North American Network Operators Group

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RE: Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly

  • From: Timothy R. McKee
  • Date: Mon Oct 15 11:49:37 2001

The majority of the CLECs pick up your copper in the 'remote', each Central
Office is serviced by a large number of remotes that concentrate the copper
and usually implement a protocol known as GR.303 to oversubscribe the
remote, normally at about a 4:1 ratio.  The resulting lines are then routed
back to the CO via high cap circuits, usually on a SONET ring.  The remotes
may be just fine, but if the CO is damaged/destroyed your calls have nowhere
to terminate.

CLECs and DLECs pick up the copper at the remotes just like the incumbent
telco, but they jump off of the SONET ring in different locations, not at
the CO.  If you had service via the incumbent AND via one of the xLECs it
would generally require widespread devastation in multiple locations (or at
the remote itself) to take you completely out of service for any extended
time period.

FYI:  We don't service the NorthEast US and I don't have explicit topology
information for NYC, but this description covers every telephone office I
have ever seen.

Tim McKee


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Kath
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 02:16
To: Sean Donelan; [email protected]
Subject: RE: Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly


I'm confused as to this comment:

"Assuming they are willing to spend the money, business customers can
achieve redundancy, or surplus and backup capacity, by running cables to
several different central offices or, in some cases, by using several
different communications carriers. Several of Verizon's competitors, in
fact, have benefited from the disruptions by signing up new customers in
Lower Manhattan. "

Are they referring to voice CLECs (or data CLECs for that matter)?

I don't see how this situation could have helped them, but only hurt them.
I mean, if you have a physical facilities issue (severed copper/fiber optic,
damaged CO), then you are gonna have problems with telephone or data service
no matter who you use.  Plus, some of us know how long opening and
resolution of a trouble ticket with an ILEC can take when coming from a
CLEC, but now you could only imagine when Verizon has a serious issue, like
this.

Even if it was a CLEC who ran/leased their own fiber/copper outside of
Verizon's network, chances are they are in the same tunnels as Verizon.

Are they maybe talking about telephone/data over satellites/microwave or
something else wireless?

- james


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
Sean Donelan
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 1:52 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: NYT: Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly




The New York Times is reporting about some of the issues Verizon
is facing with its New York recovery.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/technology/15PHON.html

Although most people are focusing on Verizon, things are much
more interesting when you look at the interaction of all the
different carriers in lower Manhattan.  And what I think is
more important, what happened outside of Manhattan.  Carriers
restored service be re-routing circuits through Cleveland and
London (Yes, England).

One issue that did come up was government planning was limited
to Verizon.  So alternate capacity which could have been used
during the first few days went unused, and some services were
disrupted because employees of non-Verizon carriers weren't
allowed into the area.