Several people sent me reports about switch troubles in Los Angeles in January. I thought I had tracked it down to a problem in the AT&T network. But Qwest also had an switch problems in Los Angeles and elsewhere for 11 days in January. NetworkWorld reported Qwest is using Lucent switches, but had old software on some of the switches. Lucent had no comment, except to say the same switches are the same hardware used in many of the world's largest service provider networks. A worrying comment, since this is at least the second time Lucent hardware has been involved in a multi-week problem. Since Lucent equipment was also involved in the 10 days of Worldcom problems, is there a common root cause between the Worldcom's problems and Qwest's problems? Is there some lesson other providers should be learning from these events? Or is each service provider expected to learn and re-learn these lessons individually? Is there some network design decision engineers are getting wrong?
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Sean Donelan