I have doubts that they were referring to a 5E. Optical muxes, and passive optical feeds just passing through, maybe. The node in this case is the old Teleport Communications Group main node that became ATT/Local Network Services when they were acquired. I posted about this here in NANOG two days ago. It is six levels down and amply fitted with backup battery plant to sustain long outages, and was conceivably insulated enough to resist the turmoil above for six hours of continued service. Some elements in this node also stayed up and running for a moderately extended period during the last WTC failure, eight years ago, during the bombing incident of 1993. -FAC

At 08:21 PM 9/14/2001, Randy Neals wrote:

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AT&T's switch in the basement apparently operated after the collapse until 4PM. They expect to recover the switch hardware....

Gotta love the 5E...

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So if you can build a switch room that doesn't collapse when 2 x 110 story buildings fall on it, why not get those engineers to design the building so it doesn't collapse in the first place?

Oh, please...

An hour or so of 1200-1500+ degrees?