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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: S100 who wrote (3445)	9/13/2001 1:49:39 PM
From: S100	Respond to of 12239

FCC: Phone system ready to reopen market Reuters September 13, 2001 6:37 AM PT WASHINGTON--The top U.S. regulator of the communications industry on Thursday said he is in constant contact with the nation's telephone companies and said they will likely have most of the capacity needed for the U.S. financial markets to function when they reopen. Wireless and land-line telephone networks were overwhelmed and some facilities were damaged on Tuesday after four commercial airliners were hijacked and two of them crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, a third crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington and a fourth went down in rural Pennsylvania. "I think the companies who are going to have to service (the markets), feel confident they will have the majority of the capacity necessary," Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell told reporters. "It depends on when and what the full load is." Powell also said he is maintaining twice daily contact with Ivan Seidenberg, co-chief executive officer of Verizon Communications (VZ.N), the dominant local phone company in the New York area and Michael Armstrong, chief executive of AT&T, the nation's biggest long-distance telephone carrier. "Verizon has done a remarkable job. For example, their wireless infrastructure, we had to figure out how to replace it, they lost some 10 towers," Powell said. "We figured out how to replace them by putting up mobile facilities on the New Jersey side." AT&T said it handled 431 million calls on Tuesday, a record, while Verizon said it was handling about 340 million calls, about twice its normal daily traffic volume. Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, said the agency was working with emergency officials to install more mobile telephone transmitter towers around the crash sites in case people trapped in the rubble are trying to call. "So far we've really been pretty encouraged, how remarkable is it a story that someone buried in rubble is getting a signal and making a telephone call and that's how they're finding somebody," he said. The FCC has received several requests from companies it regulates, including from television stations seeking permission to install transmitters on different towers since several local New York stations had transmitters on the top of the twin towers, he said. Powell said his father was tired but was focused on the task before him as the chief diplomat in the U.S. government. "He's tired, he's weary, but he's engaged and he's a soldier and this is what he does," the younger Powell said. "He will spend every ounce of himself on it and both as a son and a citizen that gives me an enormous amount of comfort zdnet.com

To: S100 who wrote (3445)	9/13/2001 2:48:01 PM
From: S100	Respond to of 12239

Cell phones in hijacked airliners worked ASSOCIATED PRESS in New YorK Next story -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Passengers on the hijacked airliners were able to dial emergency hot lines or call relatives because their planes were within range of ground-based cellular network antennas. In-flight cell phone calls are illegal because of concerns the signals could interfere with navigational equipment. Of course, that was not a concern of the desperate people who telephoned from Tuesday's flights. Though mobile phones are not designed for air-to-ground communication, they work if they have a direct line of sight to a cell tower. That was 13 to 16 kilometres for an analogue wireless phone and 8km for a digital phone — easily within the cruising altitude of commercial jets, said Marvin Sirbu, an engineering professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. Cellular connections can be blocked by buildings or foliage. But from the air, phones can have a direct path to antenna configured to receive signals from above. A call from a plane travelling at 885 kilometres per hour would need to be transferred to a different cell tower every minute or so, which could explain why some callers were cut off then almost immediately re-establish connections. technology.scmp.com