Re: Illuminet ss7 cable cut (was Re: New York City: ATT Local Service (TCG))

[Charles Sprickman]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, John Fraizer wrote:

> You would think that ANY outage of this size would require an outage
> report, no matter what the duration.  

I imagine that if Illuminet customers actually provided any local service
(residential or business), this would cause a bit of a stink.  If someone
couldn't make a life or death 911 call, even more so.  ATTLS at least (the
one customer of Illuminet I'm aware of) sells very heavy to the dialup
market.  The one customer I knew of that didn't fit the recip-comp
paradigm is NYU.  I only know this because there used to be a piece of
paper hanging in the switch tech's office that reminded them they must
page some telecom manager there whenever there was a service disruption.

So even though this left thousands of dialup ports dead for at least 6
hours and left many dialup customers furious, I doubt that much will be
made of it outside nanog.

Nice loophole they have in reporting though.

Charles

> Oh well.  I guess Illuminet
> stockholders can expect to see a loss... That is unless the CLECs and IXCs
> who use them for interconnect were stupid enough not to require SLAs or
> stupid enough not to enforce them.  Then again, most dialup users, let
> alone local/ld dialtone carriers have enforceable SLAs so, the CLECs and
> IXCs probably have a battle ahead of them to get any compensation out of
> the mess.
> 
> ---
> John Fraizer
> EnterZone, Inc
> 
> 
> On 28 Jun 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The problem is with a Bell Atlantic cable cut affecting Illuminet.  Illuminet
> > is a SS7 network provider which interconnects many different IXCs and CLECs
> > with the local ILEC.  The cable is along Route 30 in Lancaster Pennsylvania.
> > 
> > This is not the first time a cable cut has taken out the SS7 signaling
> > in the Illuminet network.  But due to the quirks in the FCC reporting
> > regulations, Illuminet hasn't reported any outage.  Previously Illuminet
> > has a cable cuts in Illinois on February 26, 1998 and October 1997 which
> > disrupted many CLECs and IXCs.  Instead of installing their own dedicated
> > circuits to every SS7 STP, they use Illuminet as a shared network.  This
> > means a problem with a relatively unknown network has very widespread affect.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
>