[27011] in North American Network Operators' Group
Worldcom and Qwest switch places
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Sat Feb 5 02:03:26 2000
Date: 4 Feb 2000 23:00:35 -0800
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To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
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Several people sent me reports about switch troubles in Los Angeles in January.
I thought I had tracked it down to a problem in the AT&T network. But Qwest
also had an switch problems in Los Angeles and elsewhere for 11 days in January.
NetworkWorld reported Qwest is using Lucent switches, but had old software
on some of the switches. Lucent had no comment, except to say the same
switches are the same hardware used in many of the world's largest service
provider networks. A worrying comment, since this is at least the second
time Lucent hardware has been involved in a multi-week problem.
Since Lucent equipment was also involved in the 10 days of Worldcom problems,
is there a common root cause between the Worldcom's problems and Qwest's
problems? Is there some lesson other providers should be learning from
these events? Or is each service provider expected to learn and re-learn
these lessons individually? Is there some network design decision engineers
are getting wrong?
