September 12, 2001
Panicked Phone Traffic
Jams Lines in Northeast
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington strained the nation's
telecommunications systems, knocking out telephone and wireless service
across the Northeast for hours and making it almost impossible for millions
of Americans to check in with loved ones in the two cities.
As news stations went live with images of the
catastrophic attacks, traffic on the nation's
telephone and wireless networks skyrocketed
as anxious Americans began placing calls to friends and family members in
New York and Washington. None of the networks broke under the strain,
but the resulting congestion made it nearly impossible for many calls to go
through. "There isn't really a lot we can do," said Verizon Communications
Inc. spokesman Eric Rabe. "We have just incredible volumes of traffic."
AT&T Corp., for example, said its long-distance network carried an average
of four million calls every five minutes after the attacks, double the normal
call volume, with traffic heaviest in New York and Washington, according to
company spokesman Dave Johnson. "The system is just overloaded," he
said.
The nation's cellular networks were the hardest hit, with wireless users in
cities throughout the country reporting an inability to make or receive calls.
In New York, survivors of the attack stood in long lines near banks of pay
phones across the city as they tried to relay that they were safe. Jared
Forman, a 26-year-old paralegal who was standing in a line in Brooklyn, said
he tried to call his mother from his cellphone at least a dozen times, but gave
up after hearing only busy signals.
Because of widespread cellphone problems and heavy volume, Verizon,
New York, said it was making calls from its 4,000 Manhattan payphones
free for the duration of the emergency. The company said the payphones
would be able to receive incoming calls indefinitely. Normally, Verizon
payphones, like those of other major carriers, don't accept such calls.
Aside from the unprecedented levels of congestion, the nation's
telecommunications infrastructure was also battered by the destruction of
large amounts of telephone and wireless network equipment. In New York,
tens of thousands of business customers of Verizon; Sprint Corp., Kansas
City, Mo.; and AT&T, New York, lost local phone service because the
attacks destroyed network switching equipment the companies maintained in
the World Trade Center.
Sprint, for example, said about 75,000 calls were blocked on its network
within an hour after the initial explosion, while Verizon said equipment
serving about 40,000 lines was destroyed when the second building
collapsed. The attacks also destroyed several large cellular-phone towers on
the roofs of the buildings, knocking out mobile-phone access throughout the
city for much of the day.
It is unclear how soon full service will be restored, though all three
companies said they were routing calls through other cities and locations.
The companies also said they hoped to replace the equipment as soon as
possible. AT&T, for instance, said that a fleet of specially equipped
18-wheel trucks that it typically sends to the sites of natural disasters was en
route to New York Tuesday. The trucks can temporarily replace nearly any
piece of telecommunications equipment and handle both voice and data
traffic.
Dale Hatfield, former chief engineer for the Federal Communications
Commission, said the difficulties callers across the country encountered was
the inevitable result of a sudden spike in usage.
"It's statistically impossible to provide enough lines to connect everyone, so
the networks are built around the fact that the whole country doesn't
simultaneously call Washington or New York," he said.
Mr. Hatfield said advanced routing and switching equipment had prevented a
much greater telecommunications breakdown. The equipment allowed phone
companies to preserve capacity for emergency communication by blocking
inbound calls to New York and Washington and giving priority to outbound
calls by medical, governmental and security personnel in the two cities. He
said the equipment also allowed the companies to route traffic through intact
networks and equipment in other areas.
Telecommunications difficulties also spread overseas. Callers throughout
Europe reported difficulty reaching numbers in the U.S. following the
incidents, as European domestic networks and possibly also trans-Atlantic
lines buckled under the strain. A spokesman for British Telecommunications
PLC said its customers were attempting to make 10 times as many calls as
usual, or about 250,000 every 15 minutes. A France Telecom spokesman,
meanwhile, said French customers had attempted to place 500,000 calls to
the U.S. in a single hour Tuesday, compared with 20,000 on an average
Tuesday. "You multiply that number by the number of countries in Europe
and you see what happens," he said.
-- Elliot Spagat, Kevin Delaney, Ann Davis and Rebecca Blumenstein
contributed to this article.
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com |
