Month: February 1998

Wed Feb 4 06:28:18 PST 1998 — PacBell had some problems getting the X2 hunt group configured. However, it’s happening right now! X2 is offline while the switch operator runs her transactions on our ports, and should be back up by 7am. -Scott

Wed Feb 4 14:04:55 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell has pretty much completed the transition to the new switch protocol, and we no longer have problems with calls from caller-ID blocked users being refused with a fast busy signal. This project took a week to push through PacBell’s monolithic paper pushing organism, and we’re not very pleased about the handling of the whole situation. The good news is that users no longer need to dial ‘*82,’ to get through to the affected equipment! This should mean less of these false fast busy signals (actually a reorder tone), and that’s great! We’re tracking a number of other issues in our dialup group, and we’ll keep you posted here as we find solutions. -Dane

Tue Feb 3 18:34:07 PST 1998 — We’ve ordered four more PRI circuits which will be installed on February 26th. These circuits add 92 ports to our current capacity of about 790 total ports. They will be served by another new USR Total Control Enterprise Hub, offering v.34+, X2 and ISDN. -Dane

Tue Feb 3 18:31:27 PST 1998 — We’ll be working on our X2 equipment on Wednesday morning between midnight at 6am. This should (finally) fix the problems with fast busy signals (aka reorder tone) with users who have caller ID blocking enabled. PacBell has been working for over a week on getting the paperwork together to get this order completed, and it’s been quite a hassle. This equipment also serves analog callers who call any of our Sonoma county dialups during busy times. -Dane

Sun Feb 1 23:13:26 PST 1998 — MAE West Gigaswitch failure At around 9am this morning, MFS Datanet performed some maintenance on a Gigaswitch at their Metro Area Exchange (MAE) West facility in Silicon Valley. The switch failed. MFS is still troubleshooting the problem. They have flown in one of the original designers of MAE West; if reports are correct, he arrived at the facility about 20 minutes ago.

While other exchange points can handle Sunday traffic just fine, the North American chunk of the Internet will begin weekday traffic loads in just a few hours. If MFS can’t get the Gigaswitch back up by then, there could be a noticeable impact on bandwidth in the US. -Scott