I happened to flick over to this right at the start, and thought the content was actually quite factual for this kind of programme. They obviously concentrated on Voice, lots of interviews with Verizon and AT&T types, lots of footage of the West Street CO which must have been 60-70% of the content. The bits that did touch on data seemed to actually be quite accurate if very brief, correctly "getting it" that the Internet didn't suffer any major problems in the immediate aftermath, and that e-mail was a major communications mechanism, although individual news content providers were swamped. They also had a good description of how a SONET ring works, so they must have had a decent technical advisor. There was a small segment on the New York Times website, and the steps they took drop graphical content to try and keep things running. Not too bad overall, I normally switch this kind of thing off as the content is usually hopelessly inaccurate but watched this right up to the end. -- Rob. --On 06 August 2002 09:28 +0100 cw <security@fidei.co.uk> wrote:
On Tue, 6 Aug 2002 04:41:59 +1000 (EST), Alan Sawyer wrote:
Might be of interest, BBC-2 has a story on the impact of Sept-11 on comms networks (7:30 GMT). Seems a little dramatic given the real (to comms) impact it had but it may make interesting viewing.
Alan.
I happened to switch the TV on part way through. It wasn't exactly overwhelming on actual detail. They concentrated solely on the AT&T network (not being familiar with the US network there I don't know if there are others involved). They explained some of the basic principles that the network management team used to cope with the demand but the most technical they got was showing the AT&T switch building that got severely damaged when one of the minor buildings collapsed. They did stretch to cover wireless coverage and how the mobile phone network was affected along with emergency plans of bringing in mobile transmitting units to keep the network running.
-- Rob.