The regulatory back door big telecom uses to weaken security regulation.
By Andrea Peterson
The outages hit in the summer of 1991. Over several days, phone lines in major metropolises went dead without warning, disrupting emergency services and even air traffic control, often for hours. Phones went down one day in Los Angeles, then on another day in Washington, DC and Baltimore, and then in Pittsburgh. Even after service was restored to an area, there was no guarantee the lines would not fail again - and sometimes they did. The outages left millions of Americans disconnected.
The culprit? A computer glitch. A coding mistake in software used to route calls for a piece of telecom infrastructure known as Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) caused network-crippling overloads. It was an early sign of the fragility of the digital architecture that binds together the nation's phone systems.
I worked in the Engineering group that was responsible for SS7 in New England. During the runup to Local Number Portability, when we were considering new vendors for SS7 devices, I expressed doubts about the software some of those vendors used: one vendor refused to allow examination of their software, while anohter depended on Off-the-shelf commercial software to handle their supervisory and management functions.
I passed my concerns along to upper management, and they did whatever they did.
Bill Horne Moderator