[CO down..]
All the more reason hospitals, etc. should shun Centrex, imho. It's putting all your eggs in one basket...
Ameritech wiped out a CO a few weeks ago while working on the SS7 link at 2pm in the afternoon. One of the hospitals affected is pretty peeved about that. I've gotten used to techs trashing my data circuits at peak times, but I thought they knew better than to mess with a SS7 datalink in the middle of the day. Many electrical outages went unnoticed by the public, until the introduction of digital clocks. After that, the public started to notice the outages everytime their clocks started blinking 12:00. I suspect the Internet is starting to do the same thing for the telephone system. The phone system had many mini-outages which the public rarely noticed unless they happened to be using the phone at the exact moment. Now computers and the Internet are serving the same function as the blinking 12:00 on digital clocks. Any blip in the phone system is magnified by the other connected systems. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation