Robust Grid Haltingly Soldiers On
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon triggered a flood of calls Tuesday that temporarily overwhelmed the telecommunications networks around New York and Washington, turning the phone lines into a droning busy signal.
Yet with a few notable exceptions, the electronic communications pipelines that Americans take for granted haltingly soldiered on. Phone calls eventually got through, e-mails arrived, and two-way pagers provided a lifeline when all else failed.
The attack highlighted the ability of the U.S. communications grid to bend without breaking, even under extreme circumstances. But it also served as a reminder of the sometimes frustrating limits in the capacity of that grid--limits that deregulated and competing phone companies have little incentive to address.
In Manhattan, the destruction of the World Trade Center crippled selected wireless, local and long-distance lines that ran into or under those buildings.
For example, a significant number of Manhattan businesses that used AT&T; Corp.’s local phone service lost their lines Tuesday because the company’s switching office was inside the World Trade Center, spokesman Dave Johnson said. Those customers aren’t likely to have local or long-distance phone service for more than three days, he said.
Sprint Corp. had some long-distance equipment below the World Trade Center, and its loss caused some customers in the region to lose their long-distance service temporarily.
Verizon Wireless reported that seven to 10 of its “couple hundred” mobile cell sites in New York went down because of fiber-optic lines destroyed in the attack. The company has begun setting up a dozen temporary cell sites--many of them across the Hudson River--to provide service to the region surrounding the World Trade Center.
Its parent company, Verizon Communications, announced late Tuesday that it would make calls from 4,000 pay phones in Manhattan free “for the duration of the current emergency.”
The phenomenal growth in Internet and data traffic in the last five years sent phone companies into an historic spending spree, laying more fiber and buying more equipment than ever before in an attempt to win corporate customers and keep up with swelling demand.
Although the intense buildout ruined city streets and pushed dozens of start-up phone companies into bankruptcy, it also created a patchwork of overlapping and interconnected networks so robust that communications traffic can be routed around isolated disasters with relative ease.
“It’s very hard to wipe out major portions of the [communications] network . . . all of the big carriers are interconnected with each other for overflow and backup,” said Tom Casey, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based Global Crossing Ltd., which operates a worldwide communications network.
Still, even redundant networks have limited capacity. And in the current telecommunications environment, those limits are dictated by the market and competitors, not by government regulators.
Verizon reported 230 million calls logged in New York and 70 million in Washington by 4 p.m., twice the normal number for both cities.
Even some Internet traffic was affected, although the network easily absorbed the sudden increase in traffic after the attacks.
When the computers inside the World Trade Center were destroyed, dropping their links to the Net, all the data headed there--either as a final destination or just as a way station--initially had no place to go. The data floated in cyberspace for about an hour, causing some congestion, before being delivered via alternative routes or returned to the sender.
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Reuters was used in compiling this report.
