Anyone thought on the telco side yet about perceived issues with Y2K?
Specifically, I was discussing with one of my telco guys about the
sociological effects, namely, everyone watching the ball drop, then going
off hook to see if they have dial tone, or dialing in to the Internet to
see if it still works. Since most switches aren't designed for 100% off
hook load, anyone seen any studies as to whether the switches will crash
from that? I do envision seconds to get dialtone. I remember in our
college days the new Nortel from Sprint took about 4 seconds to give us
dialtone right after the Gulf War bombing started (mostly paranoid college
guys debating if they were eligible for the draft I believe). Anyways,
thoughts?
Eric
I seem to recall data from california, where a good number of handsets get
knocked off-hook during earthquakes. AFAIK no switch ever crashed as a
result of the load.
-Dan
A few months ago, there was an ilec that i got to hear stories
about from a line tech as they were fixing one of my phone lines
at home.
I live in a college town, and what happens is that there is a lot
of property that goes up for rent come june/july, and a lot of people move
in in september, and late aug.
What they did was wire all these places up to the same switch.
Every day when classes got out, some residences that happened
to get installed into the same switch had to wait up to 45 seconds for
dialtone because of the load of people coming home, calling friends, or
dialing up to the local campus network.
I suspect that you will be unable to get dialtone because of
these types of issues, but you will get dialtone eventually, just not
the second you pick the phone up.
This will mean that people who have stuff break because of y2k
may not be able to call anyone depending on your communications methods.
I find this quite an interesting challenge, if you can't place
a call, you can't get paged to know that your router in some remote
site just died, nor can they call to tell you, nor can you call the
utilities to determine why.
- Jared