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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

No big deal for yourselves maybe, but we had several hundred ISDN customers hammer or NOC at that time, since all BRI's in SE MO are served out of that CO.

The preliminary report says 66,000 phone customers lost phone service for about two hours. The CO outage also affected 9-1-1, hospital and other emergency services for 5 cities and surrounding areas. I'm assuming this is only counting POTS service because we saw some ISDN and data circuits out-of-service for 10-12 hours. Unfortunately due to Southwestern Bell corporate policies, I can't conduct the usual 'due diligence' I do with our CLEC providers. Finally around 5am, Southwestern Bell started accepting trouble tickets again. They wouldn't accept them earlier until their techs gave the 'all clear.'

I did talk to someone about the problem, but unfortunatly, SWBT has moved their NOC to KC and they were clueless to the problem, and their battery ran dry, and the generator failed to start.

Cluelessness is not an attribute restricted to ISPs. Southwestern Bell's official spokesperson was quoted: "Cordless phones won't work during power outages because they need electricity to operate. As a safety precaution, he recommended keeping a spare corded phone." Oops, I think he picked up the wrong script. He needed the Central office failure script, not the Cordless phone failure script. When I was growing up, my next door neighbor was the president of Southwestern Bell Telephone and we got phone service out of this same Central Office. I guess things have declined a bit since the current president moved the corporate offices to San Antonio, Texas. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation