Video advertisement discussing the telephone equipment that was needed before the buildings could work....
- in the website's discussion, they comment that "None of AT&T's employees were hurt in the attacks." That's kind of true, but some Verizon personnel were killed.
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Were any secondary or primary central offices impacted in the WTC area by the attack that affected telephone service? I know cell phones were overwhelmed, but I'm not sure about the impact on land lines (given the calamity, they may have been overwhelmed, too.)
I know some people who until that time did not have cell phones. After 9/11 they got them for emergencies.
There was a Verizon CO down the street that had its windows and part of a wall blown out.
The reference was to AT&T employees, not to phone employees in general.
Weren't a number of C.O's serving customers in the WTC on several floors of= the WTC? Surely they were destroyed, too.
Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com
Yes, this is the source of the myth that the Internet is more resilient than the phone system. By sheer coincidence, there is a major NYT (now VZ) central office in the VZ headquarters building at
140 West St, across the street from the WTC, which was badly damaged when the WTC buildings collapsed, also due to water in underground vaults, seriously disrupting both voice and data circuits. The major Internet hub was (and is) 60 Hudson St, the old WU building, which was far enough away to be undamaged, so Internet service was OK to the extent it didn't depend on circuits going through 140 West St. If the buildings happened to be swapped, the meme would be that the Internet collapses in a disaster and the phone network is rock solid.R's, John
***** Moderator's Note *****Oh, come now, John: EVERYBODY knows that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war!
Bill Horne Moderator
Well, as other threads have indicated that doesn't always work either since after a major event everyone goes to use the network and because of the load on the network your call fails.
The more likely reason that people were getting more cellphones in
2001 is that they were becoming cheaper and it became "normal" to have a cellphone since you could have a phone for as little as a few dollars a month.
Ironic that the hub of message record communications is the Western Union building, which used to handle message record telegraph traffic. As discussed before, the old Western Union company had high hopes to be a big player in data communications, since after all, that was their primary business. I still wonder, given the benefit of hindsight, if anything could've been done differently to save the company and let it be part of the data comm revolution. (There is some suggestion FCC unfairly favored the Bell System over Western Union in some regulatory decisions).
The former long time AT&T HQ was at 195 Broadway, not far away. The original AT&T is gone, too, having been bought out by one of the Baby Bells. Do they still have a presence in Bernardsville, NJ, where their network communications center used to be? Is the statue of Golden Boy still out there?
In 1984 AT&T moved Golden Boy to their new HQ in Bernardsville. After SBC bought the husk of AT&T, in 2009 they moved him to their HQ in Dallas, the Whitacre Tower. (Yes, really.)
There is more than one "major Internet hub" in downtown NYC, which should come as no surprise. There's a fairly important facility on the upper floors of the 1933 AT&T headquarters building at 32 6th Ave.
-GAWollman
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