<A> After Phone Outage, Teleport Thinks Of Firing Illuminet
By Shawn Young
(as I understand it, when mature, ~60% of WCII's traffic will "on net" - their OWN net)
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Phone companies and their customers are scrambling for backup after a signaling problem knocked out phone service Wednesday at the world's largest oil market and a major New York hospital.
The trouble is, phone systems are so interconnected that even firing your phone company won't guarantee that your phones won't go out because of obscure technical problems at a company you didn't hire.
That's what happened Wednesday, when a major problem at a privately-held Olympia, Wash., company called Illuminet forced the New York Mercantile Exchange to close early for the second time since October. The outage also crippled Bell Atlantic Mobile, a unit of Bell Atlantic Corp. (BEL), which serves 5.5 million people on the East Coast.
The Mercantile Exchange isn't an Illuminet customer. Neither is Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. But their local phone company, Teleport Communications Group Inc. (TCGI), is.
Illuminet provides the signaling services that help route calls and make the handoffs between long-distance and local networks - or, in the case of Bell Atlantic Mobile, between wireless and conventional phone networks.
Teleport spokesman Roger Cawley said his company is looking for alternatives to Illuminet because of the second outage. For Teleport, which is about to merge with AT&T Corp. (T), an alternative is at hand. AT&T has its own signaling system, as do MCI Communications Corp. (MCIC) and Sprint Corp. (FON).
But phone systems are like a lattice, crossing each other and linking all over the place so that even the most comprehensive networks cross other systems and use other signals at times. Most, if not all, phone networks connect directly or indirectly with each other at some point.
Cawley acknowledged that it's impossible to be completely safe from third-party technical glitches.
A Mercantile Exchange spokeswoman said NYMEX is looking for a backup local carrier. While that might not completely protect the exchange, having a backup should help, she said.
For phone companies, reliability is an obsession.
Teleport Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Annunziata can wax eloquent about the importance of reliability, the beauty of redundancy.
"He is seething," said Teleport spokesman Cawley. "To have someone else have such an impact on our customers is very frustrating."
AT&T, the likely recipient of Teleport's signaling business, doesn't use Illuminet at all, said AT&T spokesman Dave Johnson.
Meanwhile, Bell Atlantic Mobile is reviewing alternatives to Illuminet, spokesman Jim Gerace said.
"There is never any more serious problem for us than what happened yesterday (Wednesday)," he said.
He said service was disrupted from New England to the Southeast, in some cases, for as long as three hours. That has never happened before, he said.
"We're all over them," he said of Illuminet.
Illuminet, which had gross revenue of about $50 million in 1997, initially attributed the failure to a cut cable in Illinois, but that doesn't seem to be the cause, said Nancy Jackson, an Illuminet spokeswoman.
The company is investigating the cause of the failure, which it said started with a "fiber facility failure." That could mean there was a programming error, Jackson said.
When the fiber facility in Mattoon, Ill., went down, the switching systems in Mattoon and Rock Hill, S.C., that are connected to it failed, Jackson said. She said the company doesn't know why the systems, which are supposed to back each other up, both failed.
To a lesser degree, a similar thing happened in October. When the Mattoon system konked out, the Rock Hill one took over, but it got swamped and began to malfunction, excommunicating parts of the network.
The company attributed the October outage to software supplied by a vendor that mishandled crises the system was designed to withstand. Illuminet outlined a series of steps it would take to make sure there wasn't a reoccurrence.
After Wednesday's failure, President and Chief Executive Roger Moore said in a press release: "Our network is engineered to meet or exceed industry standards for redundancy. Unfortunately, each of the pair of signaling switches failed and, as a result, carrier networks were isolated. We are working with our switching manufacturer to determine the root cause of the problem and will take whatever action is necessary to prevent a reoccurrence."
"Certainly we have a number of customers who are not very pleased with us," Jackson said.
She said customers who wanted to hire another signaling company would probably have to spend months rejiggering their networks to go around Illuminet.
|
