COMM Telephone Outage in South Central Wisconsin

Red Baron

Red Baron

Paleo-Conservative
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About mid-morning today my brother called me and said that his wife got a page at her home, from the hospital she works at (different county) informing her of a "cascading" telephone failure affecting her hospital.

Brother and I never had heard of such an alert before and couldn't find out anything else until the noon news on the radio.

WTMJ 620 AM at Noon reported a significant telephone outage affecting many homes, busineses and governmental agencies in Walworth County Wisconsin. Both land lines and cellular traffic are impacted. Especially Vonage and Cingular service. The Lake Geneva Police Chief reported no land or cell service until he drove away from the city and finally got a connection on his cell.

Nothing on the web regaring this and no weather or accidents appear related to the outage.

- Anything weird going on in Walworth County WI?

- Why both land and cell service being affected?

- Why a priority page from the hospital?

- Aren't land lines a very robust network going all the way back to Cold War redundancy?

- Can .gov agencies shutdown the network now?
 
M

mostlyharmless

Veteran Member
That sure is strange! Your post is not entirely clear regarding cellular telephones. Is there no signal (ie phone with no bars or says "NO SERVICE") or do calls through cellphones fail to go through?

Vonage and other IP telephony devices should not be affected by this "local" outage since their calls are routed through several carriers throughout the world. If one carrier has issues, their systems would re-try on another.

The POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is fairly robust, but I'd be highly surprised to learn of redundant switching in areas other than in areas like NYC, DC or LA.

When you pick up a POTS phone, do you have a dialtone? Is it silent? Perhaps a delay on the dialtone (silence for several seconds, then a tone)?
 
Red Baron

Red Baron

Paleo-Conservative
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Cells phones are getting the "can't find the number you are dialing" message and landlines have the "all lines are busy" message.
 
M

mostlyharmless

Veteran Member
Well, I know rural telephone companies have issues all the time, although I find it bothersome that cellular calls are also affected. Is it not possible to call out of the local area? Perhaps tollfree outbound at least?!
 
J

John H

Inactive
Actually POTS has much redundancy. Although calls go up the hierarchy tree of switching centers, there are also many routes between similar classes of switching centers. Each center had connections to nearby offices of the same class.

When I was an engineer with the phone company, many moons ago, there were 5 classes of central offices from level 5 in individual communities up to the main level 1 regional centers.

Calls between say class 5 offices would normally go over lines to adjacent class 5 offices and only up the tree when all circuits were busy, etc.

:ld:

John H
 
B

BlueNewton

Membership Revoked
I find this to be extraordinarily peculiar! Landlines AND cells out? Two completely different systems. And there should be no reason for a traffic overload. Please let us know if you hear more!
 
P

Peanut

Resident Pit Yorkie :)
Thank you...this explains why my Cingular phone is having problems connecting today. Sitting here in my home I usually have 5 bars...right now...I have none. I am *just* south of Walworth county.
 
D

Double_A

TB Fanatic
Cellphones use regular telephone lines to make the connections inbetween.

You can have 5 bars on your cellphone because YOUR nearby cellsite is fine, but if the interconnecting landlines are down you won't get through.

Yes the land lines are extremely robust. The DOD was the main objector to the break-up of AT&T into the Babybells. Most of their comms went through AT&T landlines. They had mandated redundency and back-up, they felt that this could not be insured if AT&T was broken up. Now they are all on Sat comms that can be destroyed by Mass Coronal eruptions and Chinese Anti-sat weapons.
 
C

ceeblue

Inactive
Hfcomms said:
Probably as simple as a contractor cutting a fiber optic line.
Click to expand...
They did that on I-90 a few years ago with a backhoe. Another time a couple years ago there was a big explosion at a factory in Milwaukee that took out a fibre optic line running near the Interstate. My ISP was down for a few hours.

As far as I know, Beloit was fine today. Over in Walworth County, maybe bigfoot was throwing rocks at the UFOs and the UFO took out one of the fibre optic lines trying to blast the bigfoots.
 
B

baw

Inactive
ceeblue said:
As far as I know, Beloit was fine today. Over in Walworth County, maybe bigfoot was throwing rocks at the UFOs and the UFO took out one of the fibre optic lines trying to blast the bigfoots.
Click to expand...

Bigfoot in Wisconsin ? :shkr: Why didn't anyone tell me about that before I moved here!
 
D

Double_A

TB Fanatic
Kendo said:
I think it still has to route through a switch sooner or later.
Click to expand...

I can't give you an exact answer but I beleive you are correct.

My recently departed dad was a senior netwrok eng. for Pac Bell for over 30 yrs.

It irked him to no end that legal rulings required them to allow other companies bandwidth and access to THEIR network. Having never invested a dime in the infrastructure.

I'm just guessing, but I doubt if the extensive network covering towns, cities, villages and vast open areas that AT&T created could be done today in todays business climate.

I dare say that at one time AT&T (with all the locals, Western electric & Bell Labs) was as big as (if not bigger) than ALL of the automobile manufacturers in the USA combined.

But with that monopoly comes all the issues that ended up with the DOJ busting them up.
 
Red Baron

Red Baron

Paleo-Conservative
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Nothing, zip, nada on the 'Net or the local paper web site.

Note that the "cascading" outage was well before any storms moved through SE/SC WI.
 
C

ceeblue

Inactive
lectrickitty

lectrickitty

Great Great Grandma!
Red Baron said:
Cells phones are getting the "can't find the number you are dialing" message and landlines have the "all lines are busy" message.
Click to expand...
Out here in my remote area I've started getting both those messages fairly often. A few minutes later the call will go thru fine. Then a hour or a few days later, the messages are back. I've never had that happen before except when making a land line call on mothers day or some other busy holiday. For the past few weeks it's common to get the messages. They are random. I never know if it'll happen 3 or 4 times a day or not happen at all for a week or two.

I have a theory that it's simply old equipment that is "stalling" every now and then. Most of the old lines and relays are just that, OLD and very close to being worn out. The newer cell phone equipment (towers & such) are probably manufactured with substandard materials so are subject to service interruptions at any given time.

My home phone used to loose the dial tone every time it rained. It turned out that the lines that were suppose to be a min. of 3' deep were only buried a few inches down. Where they crossed roads, the weight of traffic on the rocks would cause cracks in the insulation and the moisture would get to the wires. A couple years ago they plowed in new phone cable and we haven't had the problem since.

Another problem we used to have real often was breakers jumping at the relay station. They upgraded the station with new equipment and fixed that problem.

The only problem we have now is the error messages Red Baron posted about.
 
LoupGarou

LoupGarou

Ancient Fuzzball
Most phone connections are now done via IP (whether it is single line COTS to VoIP, or bundled over service routes like ATM and SONET). All it takes is one technician to batch out an firmware upgrade or settings to the wrong router or routers and poof, there goes the network. IP is a fragile thing, and it doesn't take a lot for it to get bent, one setting typed in wrong and all sorts of chaos can happen.

I would be willing to bet that human error (or human action) caused this "cascade". At least, that is what I am hoping for. I am hoping that some H1-B "Hassan Bin Sober" isn't testing out his latest script on the network, waiting for the right time to run across the whole system...
_____


Double_A said:
Simplex (direct) radio to radio is still king! Get a Ham license
Click to expand...

+1,000

Loup
 
H

Hazard

Contributing Member
cell phone

I have been noticing the past week or so that my AT& T cellphone service is odd. Dropping calls with no service in areas I usually have service and vice versa. Very odd???
 
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