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 office. I guess that's one reason we have backup operations staff in Monterey California. Competition is also nice. We have a couple of other facility based carriers built into our building. Besides local dial tone, all the Internet services failed over to other carriers without incident. It did take a few minutes as people tried to isolate which phone numbers worked (e.g. long distance) but not other phone numbers (e.g. local, outbound 1-800, 9-1-1, etc). Time on hold to reach a human at Southwestern Bell repair service about 20 minutes. How many NOCs have contingency plans for reaching their local phone company when their local phone service is not working. I reallly, really, really hate companies which have only 1-800 numbers for their customer service centers. Any alternative carriers care to schedule an appointment for a presentation on your facilities based alternate local service offerings? People just reselling unbundled network elements from Southwestern Bell are in the same boat as SWBT. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation