Well, today's outage is a small one. Southwestern Bell lost power
to their central office in Ladue, Missouri (just outside of St. Louis).
This affects all local telephone service in Ladue and several
surrounding communities. No big deal, except our Network Operations
Center happens to receive its local dial tone from the Ladue central
office. I guess that's one reason we have backup operations staff
in Monterey California.
Competition is also nice. We have a couple of other facility based
carriers built into our building. Besides local dial tone, all the
Internet services failed over to other carriers without incident.
It did take a few minutes as people tried to isolate which phone
numbers worked (e.g. long distance) but not other phone numbers
(e.g. local, outbound 1-800, 9-1-1, etc). Time on hold to reach
a human at Southwestern Bell repair service about 20 minutes. How
many NOCs have contingency plans for reaching their local phone
company when their local phone service is not working. I reallly,
really, really hate companies which have only 1-800 numbers for
their customer service centers.
Any alternative carriers care to schedule an appointment for a presentation
on your facilities based alternate local service offerings? People
just reselling unbundled network elements from Southwestern Bell are
in the same boat as SWBT.