Re: Perceived Y2K problems

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck Nether net>]

        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

On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 09:23:25PM -0500, Eric Germann wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ==========================================================================
>   Eric Germann                                        Inacom Info Systems
>   ekgermann () cctec com                                 Lima, OH 45801
>                                                       Ph:  419 331 9050
>   ICQ:  41927048                                      Fax: 419 331 9302
>
> "It is so easy to miss pretty trivial solutions to problems deemed
> complicated.  The goal of a scientist is to find an interesting problem,
> and live off it for a while.  The goal of an engineer is to evade
> interesting problems :)"  -- Vadim Antonov <avg () kotovnik com> on NANOG

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared () puck nether net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.
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