Slashdot Mirror
Vulnerability of Telco Switching Equipment
call -151 writes: "Interesting New York times article about the Sept 11th attacks' effect
on the Verizon switches in lower Manhattan. Turns out there
was a problem in that much of the network switching was in one
building and it has taken a while to restore service. Sounds like there
is lots of pondering about the vulnerability of the network,
even when it is distributed across many physical locations.
Of course the attacks are making lots of people rethink their
vulnerabilities, but the estimate is for five years' work before there
could be redundant paths for the lines into their switches in
the one building, with no plans to spend the money to do it.
Maybe someone should send them a few hundred thousand 'self-install'
kits like they do with their DSL service ..."
Could someone post the NYTimes user and password?
For some reason, even though the link is to partners.nytimes.com it still prompts.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Sure, I suppose Telco redundancy for protection would be helpful to safeguard against risks like this...but (a) who can forsee such an event? and (b) is protecting the Telco systems any kind of priority in relation to the neccessary defense of life and peace of mind?
The main item to be gleaned from this I think is simply that there is widespread and not readily obvious impact in many sectors from this catastrophe. But reworking national infrastructures out of paranoia may be overdoing it...
So they are saying that if you take out a large telephone networks Central Office, people connected to this office will suffer lost connections. Infact some long distance connectivity will suffer as well.
Why does this suprise anyone. Hmmm let me see, if you take out your ISP, all of the sudden you will loose connectivity to the internet unless you pay A LOT of money to have a second line put in. Even then the chance that both of those lines run through some common area is pretty high.
Things are easy to engineer with fully redundancy, what isn't easy is to do it cheaply enough that people will still be willing to pay for it.
There's a building in Toronto (151 Front Street West) that's known as a "Telco hotel", in that it contains most of the switching equipment for most of southern Ontario.
:)
What's interesting however is that the ISP's of the area have also moved into this building, due to it's prime location downtown and the proximity to Telco facilities.
If someone were to drop a bomb on this building, phone service for half the province and Internet connectivity for a huge part of the Greater Toronto Area would be toast.
It's one of those things that's oft-discussed as you take the elevator up into the building. Our only hope is to remain "under the radar" of Terrorists.
During my years at Bell Labs, we drew up a fast, redundant, distributed switching system. At the time, technology wasn't up to implementing it cost-effectively. But today, it could be done for cheap using Linux and the Linux Router Project. Nearly all switches in the US are already digital, and a changeover to a fail-safe, decentralized switching system operating along the lines of a packet-switching network would be trivial. I'm almost inclined to call the Telcos irresponsible for not having made the change already.
Have they done any simulations on the impact of different failure scenarios on the system?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Not really. SS7 hardware has some buggy software, and after fixing a HLR/VLR (databases) and rebooting it, you just dropped your fivenine uptime.
Nobody really has fivenine, you can fake fivenine, if you exclude your maintence windows.
your comparison is (intentionaly, i suspect) unfair becuase you're comparing the fact that a small area of the phone network went down to the fact that the Internet overall continued to work. it's a stupid comparison.
your "analysys" is also ignorant of the physical network underlying both the phone network and the Internet. the phone network is built on top of a series of actual, physical links. the Internet is built partly on top of this, partly with additional links. lost of my friends in Manhattan lost IP connectivity because - suprise! - their phone service, which they use for IP connectivity, wasn't working.
sure, my IP connections to California were unaffected by the WTC going down. but i made phone calls from 15 min. outside the city, that day, all over the country, with no problem (other than into Manhattan).
for all that talk of redundant routing on the internet, how many lines do most people have protruding from the back of their box? 1. how many ISPs do most people have? 1. how many upstream providers do most of those ISPs have? 1. all single points of failure.
ask someone you know familiar with the net what would happen if someone took out MAE-East or MAE-West, among a handfull of other very important Internet sites. it'd be much easier, in fact, to make the Internet useless by taking out ten or so buildings than to take out the phone network by taking down 50.
uh, yeah, but it's also why my phone crashes so much less often (uh, never?) than my PC (rarely, 'cuase i run good stuff), and why my telephone company won't let me connect so much less often (once in my lifetime, while the line up my street was being worked on) than my ISP (once every month or two).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.