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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 ..."
The problem is that the telephone network isn't a routed/multiaccess network like the majority of the Internet is. You still have upwards of 10K users (lines) terminating into one telco building/closet/whatever. This simply isn't going to change; telcos, being the legacy providers that they are, simply don't have the capital (or incentive) to go and redesign a service like this from the ground up, when it performs 99.99% of the time, catastrophe or not.