Fiber won't work without electricity
At 1pm, MCI WorldCom had all MFS service restored that was in or passed through White Plains. It turns out it wasn't a fiber cut. The building they are located in (One North Broadway, which in addition to being a regular office tower includes POPs for pre-WorldCom MCI, MFS, and seemingly Nextel) was having electrical work performed by the building management. They had to shut down the entire building's power to get this work done. I stopped by at 12pm, and the building's security guards said management notified tenants last month they they would have no electricity on 10/9. At 7 or 8am the power went off, and the MFS batteries failed at 9am. It took four hours to get power back on. I guess they thought it was a fiber cut since the whole area simply went dark. At around 11am, they determined there was no electricity, and that the fiber was probably unhurt. Our C&W Internet service, which passes through the pre-WorldCom MCI POP in the same building, was unaffected. So either that facility has better batteries, or they did something to make sure that things would keep running today. -- Scott M. Drassinower scottd@cloud9.net Cloud 9 Consulting, Inc. White Plains, NY +1 914 696-4000 http://www.cloud9.net
Scott Drassinower wrote:
At 1pm, MCI WorldCom had all MFS service restored that was in or passed through White Plains. It turns out it wasn't a fiber cut.
The building they are located in (One North Broadway, which in addition to being a regular office tower includes POPs for pre-WorldCom MCI, MFS, and seemingly Nextel) was having electrical work performed by the building management. They had to shut down the entire building's power to get this work done. I stopped by at 12pm, and the building's security guards said management notified tenants last month they they would have no electricity on 10/9.
At 7 or 8am the power went off, and the MFS batteries failed at 9am.
There's this neat device called a generator... Guess MCI Worldcom never heard of 'em... Gotta wonder what they do during blizzards and other such natural disasters. Relying solely on batteries, and having only an hour or two of capacity seems rather foolhardy... Now, to be fair, if electrical work was being done in the building, it is possible any backup generators that did exist were also turned off while the work was being performed. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Senie dts@senie.com Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranthnetworks.com
The thing is that other people (like the legacy MCI POP) in the building didn't go boom. So either the MFS folk didn't coordinate things as well as the MCI guys, or the MCI guys have really big batteries. There are couple of weird looking AT&T buildings across the street with lots of cameras around the block and tons of stuff on the roof. They have what looks a generator trailer parked in their loading zone, it's been there as long as I can remember. They look prepared for something. I know their Brooks facility a couple of blocks away has some really massive battery/generator setup on-site. Relatively, that place is brand new. -- Scott M. Drassinower scottd@cloud9.net Cloud 9 Consulting, Inc. White Plains, NY +1 914 696-4000 http://www.cloud9.net On Sat, 9 Oct 1999, Daniel Senie wrote:
There's this neat device called a generator... Guess MCI Worldcom never heard of 'em... Gotta wonder what they do during blizzards and other such natural disasters. Relying solely on batteries, and having only an hour or two of capacity seems rather foolhardy...
Now, to be fair, if electrical work was being done in the building, it is possible any backup generators that did exist were also turned off while the work was being performed.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Senie dts@senie.com Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranthnetworks.com
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Daniel Senie -
Scott Drassinower