On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Michael Painter wrote:
"The Maui Visitors Bureau Visitor Information Center the agency's tourist call center on Moloka'i was crippled for 27 minutes." :) <<
I -wish- that was the extent of the cut.<smile>
According to published reports, it disrupted approximately one-third of the telephone service in the State of Hawaii up to seven hours. State officials (Governor, Public utilities commission, legislature, etc) will hold the normal hearings and investigations of Verizon.
Can someone venture a guess as to what would cause Verizon's Maui intra-island system to collapse from a fiber cut 100 miles away on another Island?
My guess, lack of SS7 diversity. Although it receives limited public discussion, the public telephone network has significant risks in comparison to the Internet. Because of the public discussion, and customer demand, ISPs have been forced to invest a lot of money in network backups and now offer SLA's significantly better than any telephone company offers. On the other hand the telephone network has been undergoing a lot of "value engineering" for the last decade, reducing their network backups. I wonder if we have reached the cross-over point, and the Internet is now effectively more reliable than the public telephone network.
Oh btw, I wasn't using it during the entire outage, but my ADSL line worked fine for the 3 hours that I did use it.
This would indicate a problem in the control systems of the PSTN, since communications which didn't use that control system were unaffected.