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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here
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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4685)7/16/1999 6:23:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio  Read Replies (3) of 12823
 
Follow up on the (linked story) Toronto Central Office Explosion, from the perspective of several Internet operators on the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG). From various posters:

[ On Friday, July 16, 1999 at 16:16:20 (-0400), <so and so> wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Canada Fiber Cut?

Not a fibre cut -- an electrical explosion and subsequent fire in the
Bell Canada Simcoe St. switch building in downtown Toronto cut power to
the switch at about 7:30EDT or so. Shortly after the fire was squelched
the batteries gave out and half of downtown Toronto lost all telephone
and data service. One electrician has been sent to hospital suffering
from smoke inhalation. The fire department reports it as a three-alarm
fire. Supposedly it was on the fourth floor of the building and the
fire went all the way up to the ninth floor before it was put out. I'm
not sure how tall the building is in total -- perhaps 12 floors -- and
it's all Bell Canada switching equipment.

Everyone in downtown Toronto no doubt knows about it by now, but of
course they can't tell anyone -- even the downtown cellular systems are
either out-of-service because of dead land-lines, or are too overloaded
by folks phoning their friends and families....

My ISP is located downtown, but they have dual-redunant connections to
their North York datacentre, which happens to be where my ISDN line
terminates so I'm still online! ;-) (though there was a short ISDN
interruption as the Bell systems routed around the dead Simcoe switch)

--
> Are you sure? Anyone notice anything down outside of the territory of
> Simcoe CO (the one that exploded)? I don't see why there would have
> been.. All our Toronto customers stayed up except those connected to
> that CO.

I'm just puppeting what I hear on the news (though I did see the live
press conference with the Bell guy when things got back to 50% alive),
but:

There was enough data service impacted that many Bank services,
including ATMs across the Metro Toronto region, as well as as far away
as downtown Ottawa were offline.

There were also supposedly long distance services as far away as Asia
affected.

I'm still seeing numerous small domains as totally non-existant because
they didn't have their DNS servers widely enough spread apart to avoid a
little outage like this (of course putting both on the same network
without your own redundant connection is just asking for trouble! ;-)

www.bell.ca is also now back up (at least I couldn't get to it from my
highly redundantly connected ISP), though there's as yet no press
release in their online "newsroom"! ;-)

> BTW, it looks like at least some stuff is back up now, I can now call
> phones connected to Simcoe.

It's supposedly mostly back up now -- though maybe not 100%. I suspect
it's running on the AC mains again and hopefully nothing happens again
before the batteries are fully re-charged again! ;-)
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