our reliable phone system --

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 19:25:24 EDT
From: LESREEVES@delphi.com
Subject: Dog Days for Telephone Networks




 From August 23 to September 3 the nation's telephone network
experienced five outages, according to the Network Reliability
Steering Committee.  On August 31, there were three outages, the most
extensive affected 39,600 customers in Encinitas, California for just
under ten hours.  The other outages were the result of a blown fuse in
Jersey City, New Jersey (Bell Atlantic) and a cable cut in Bangor,
Maine (Nynex).  On August 23 Southwestern Bell's Oklahoma City central
tandem office failed due to a "software corruption in switch"; 50,000
customers lost service for three hours.  A duplex interior bus failed
in Ft. Washington, Pennsylvania, on August 25, affecting an unknown
number of customers for 50 minutes.