WTC Telecom Damage

[Bat Wing]

Something many of you may be interested in...

NETWORKS DAMAGED: Southern Manhattan has been described as "the most communications-intensive area in the world."

Verizon, the largest telephone company, has five Central Offices serving some 500,000 telephone lines south of 14th Street. More than six million private circuits and data lines pass through switching centres in or near the World Trade Center.

AT&T and Sprint switching centres in the WTC were destroyed.

Verizon lost two WTC-specific switches in the towers, and two nearby Central Offices were knocked out by debris, fire, and water damage.

Ten Verizon Wireless cell sites were destroyed in the attack; Cingular Wireless lost six and Sprint PCS lost four. Power
failures interrupted service at many other wireless facilities.

The combination of damage and loss of power shut down all wireline phone service in and around the disaster area. It is very likely that underground cables were badly damaged, and no one can yet provide any estimate of when anything approaching normal service will be restored.

TELECOM TRAFFIC SOARS: In general, telephone networks continued operating, although heavy call volumes, ranging up to 400% of normal, caused delays for both wireline and wireless callers in New York and Washington. AT&T said its network carried a record 431 million calls on September 11. Long distance carriers were able to route most traffic around the devastated cities.

Internet traffic also soared. E-mail generally operated well, but major news sites on the Web were overwhelmed, with response times slowing to several minutes in some cases.

In Canada, Aliant reported "unprecedented increases in usage" and asked customers to restrict use of long distance, wireless, and Internet to emergencies.

TELECOM INDUSTRY RESPONDS: Much of the telecom industry's response has focused on providing emergency communications services.
A few examples:

** AT&T Wireless, Nextel, Sprint PCS, Cingular, and Verizon made thousands of cellphones and free service available to emergency service workers. Iridium and Motient donated satellite phones.

** Verizon installed hundreds of phone lines in hospitals, police stations, and temporary work centres, and made local calls from 4,000 Manhattan street payphones free for the duration of the emergency. The payphones have also been converted to accept incoming calls.

** Sprint PCS stores in New York have provided free emergency calling, and Sprint programmed its payphones in New York City to allow free calls.

** AT&T donated $10 million in prepaid long distance cards to relief workers in the two cities and is providing free long distance service from all payphones in the affected
areas of New York.

** RIM and Cingular donated RIM wireless e-mail devices and service. Metrocall offered 5,000 pagers to emergency and government workers.

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Bat

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Bat Wing on 2001-09-17 16:15 ]</font>

[Astro Logical]

I arrived in lower manhattan approx 1/2 hour after the buildings collapsed. I was able to make analog calls from downtown with an average of 10 tries per call, digital service was restored somewhat the following day with good to excellent coverage the day after.. This was using verizon.. I was there from Tuesday until sat morn and service was good and progressively better day by day.. Nextel was also functioning downtown as of the second day maybe on the first day but I can only go by what I have seen..
Nevertheless the scene down there was not pretty, I can tell you that hell looks like a better prospect than lower manhattan.. Regards.. Richy

[AJP402]

Excellent info - good detail - its nice to know the specifics. Anything further? About Nextel or the NYPD repeaters that were taken out? One cop told me they had deployed many portable repeaters for their citywide freqs.

[Pj]

Actually, AT&T E5SS switches in one of the sub-basements were still working without a problem. AT&T kept them online and waited as long as they could before they had to do reroutes before the UPS ran out of juice. I guess they don't make them like they use to.

AT&T also built their switches with certain guidelines in respect with the cold war. They had to have certain shielding and hardening requirements to survive nuclear war, etc, as NYC would have been a target for sure. You can also go to this website if your interesting in the coldwar era communications, and what is still around:
http://www19.addr.com/~longline/ There is some very intresting reading there!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Pj on 2001-09-18 18:42 ]</font>