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By Tiernan Ray
September 21, 2001
WE WILL NO DOUBT be sorting through the wreckage of last week's terrorist attacks for a long time. The human toll is still to be fully realized, and it will be many years before the political ramifications are clear.
Some of the technological implications, however, can be unraveled more easily, simply because industry has been working feverishly at the site of the destruction. No area of technology has been laid bare more than telecommunications. Last week's destruction revealed just how vulnerable and primitive are the networks upon which individuals and businesses rely for communication.
Almost anyone can tell you that the most reliable channels of information in New York were email and broadcast television. The former allowed friends and loved ones around the world to verify the safety of those in New York, while the networks kept us continually apprised of developments. It's equally obvious that cell phones, regular dial-up phone service, and Web sites fared somewhat less well. On Sept. 11, circuits were jammed on landline phones. While cell calls played a large role aboard the fateful flights last week, calls in the New York area were still blocked late last week. And news Web sites experienced such heavy traffic loads that they often could not be accessed.
What became clear as the day wore on was just how vulnerable today's Internet is. In its original incarnation as a Defense Department-funded project, the Internet was designed to serve as a communications channel in case of large attack. While email kept coming, a lot of the plumbing that makes networks run was caught short by Tuesday's events.
Basic power was a problem, of course. To give just one example: Telehouse, a privately held firm based in Staten Island, N.Y., uses a facility at 25 Broadway, just blocks from Ground Zero, to host Web sites and connect large firms such as Akamai Technologies (AKAM) and AOL Time Warner (AOL). On Tuesday, power to the building was lost and a backup generator kicked in, as planned. But Telehouse says the generator went out on Thursday due to smoke from the explosion, which clogged the unit's cooling system. A replacement generator was brought in by New York's Con Edison later that day, but this second source gave out on Saturday when diesel trucks could not make it through lower Manhattan to refuel the unit.
More interesting, though, is the way in which failure last week mirrored the Byzantine organization of phone lines in lower Manhattan, the dendrites of communication. It turns out that a surprising number of connections in New York are made through three central telephone offices downtown maintained by Verizon Communications (VZ), and one in particular, 140 West St. That office switches more than three million phone calls from different parts of the phone network in and around New York, which gives 140 West an importance to the city's telecommunications system far out of proportion to the 250,000 or so local telephone lines that it serves. 140 West is right next door to Ground Zero, and suffered major structural damage, as well as damage to its phone switches. As a result, not only did phone lines go down on Wall Street, but various other networks around town suffered as well.
Covad Communications (COVD), a digital-subscriber-line, or DSL, provider, said 21,000 of its high-speed DSL modems went down on Tuesday and were out for upwards of 24 hours, even though only 3,000 of those lines are local to 140 West. Covad passed its lines through the downtown switching centers in order to connect up with the Internet service providers who furnish the actual Internet accounts for Covad's customers. No ISP connections meant no Internet service for Covad's users.
Focal Communications FCOM, a Chicago-based competitive local exchange carrier, or CLEC, which serves 150,000 lines in New York and New Jersey, was also brought down by 140 West. Although the firm's backup generator kicked in at 32 Old Slip, on the other side of lower Manhattan from the World Trade Center, Chief Operating Officer John Barnicle says the company is still waiting to get thousands of lines restored that had been switched through 140 West. "It's a mammoth building, so it had a tremendous impact," Barnicle says. But the problem wasn't only phone service: Focal's lines are used by ISPs that park banks of modems in Focal's facilities, among them AOL. These outfits were out of luck last week, unless they could connect their lines to alternate modem banks.
Even stranger connections came to light. A spokesman for Qwest Communications (Q) noted that long-distance service to Verizon local customers as far away as Connecticut was still problematic this week because local phone circuits were routed to Qwest through 140 West. Much of that traffic had to be rerouted through another office, which requires time to reset databases in large central-office switches.
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The point is, much of the Internet, and communications networks in general, are highly vulnerable to how the underlying phone network is designed.
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The point is, much of the Internet, and communications networks in general, are highly vulnerable to how the underlying phone network is designed. While email was proof the Internet continued to function, the ripple effect on telecom was a bit like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazon: One development can have dramatic, even unforeseen effects, far and wide. And while the Net was built to route around trouble, it's clear that individual users can still feel the effects when individual portions of phone-company infrastructure go out of commission.
Telecom executives say the problem is not technology, but economics. "The answer is to have more diverse routes in your network," says David Smith, an analyst with Technology Futures in Austin, Texas, who consults on network planning for large corporations. "You can avoid a lot of problems by having multiple places to connect, but you've got to be willing to spend the money on multiple contracts." Focal's Barnicle, who saw the initial World Trade Center attack in 1993 as an MFS (later WorldCom WCOM) employee in downtown Manhattan, agrees. "This happened with the original Trade Center bombing. Companies went on a tear to diversify their networks." Obviously, some firms didn't go far enough in that direction, judging by last week's results. In the short term, Focal and other CLECs, as well as the local phone companies, will probably benefit by selling more phone lines to businesses wary of being stranded in the future.
Longer term, though, most agree the industry will have to think through the kinds of bottlenecks and choke points created at places like 140 West. If most companies weren't completely cut off in lower Manhattan last week, many came closer to isolation than we probably realize. We're just at the beginning of what will likely be a broad industry effort to take the public Internet and rebuild it with more reliability.
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