North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Today's Outage
>> Well, today's outage is a small one. Southwestern Bell lost power >> to their central office in Ladue, Missouri (just outside of St. Louis). >> This affects all local telephone service in Ladue and several >> surrounding communities. No big deal, except our Network Operations >> Center happens to receive its local dial tone from the Ladue central > >No big deal for yourselves maybe, but we had several hundred ISDN >customers hammer or NOC at that time, since all BRI's in SE MO are served >out of that CO. The preliminary report says 66,000 phone customers lost phone service for about two hours. The CO outage also affected 9-1-1, hospital and other emergency services for 5 cities and surrounding areas. I'm assuming this is only counting POTS service because we saw some ISDN and data circuits out-of-service for 10-12 hours. Unfortunately due to Southwestern Bell corporate policies, I can't conduct the usual 'due diligence' I do with our CLEC providers. Finally around 5am, Southwestern Bell started accepting trouble tickets again. They wouldn't accept them earlier until their techs gave the 'all clear.' >I did talk to someone about the problem, but unfortunatly, SWBT has moved >their NOC to KC and they were clueless to the problem, and their battery >ran dry, and the generator failed to start. Cluelessness is not an attribute restricted to ISPs. Southwestern Bell's official spokesperson was quoted: "Cordless phones won't work during power outages because they need electricity to operate. As a safety precaution, he recommended keeping a spare corded phone." Oops, I think he picked up the wrong script. He needed the Central office failure script, not the Cordless phone failure script. When I was growing up, my next door neighbor was the president of Southwestern Bell Telephone and we got phone service out of this same Central Office. I guess things have declined a bit since the current president moved the corporate offices to San Antonio, Texas. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
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