Telecommunications Failing to Connect

By THOMAS McCARROLL

The first sign of trouble came at about 5 p.m. last Tuesday, when a computer display that monitors telephone traffic at AT&T's nerve center in Bedminster, N.J., flashed from blue to magenta. Within hours, millions of consumers were seeing red too.

The problem: an electric-power failure at an AT&T switching center had knocked out the company's long-distance telephone service to more than 1 million customers in the New York City area. Thousands were stranded at airports and inside planes on runways because the outage severed communications links between air-traffic controllers and airline pilots. By 10 p.m., more than 500 planes were on the ground waiting to take off at the area's six airports, causing a cascade of delays as far away as Boston, Los Angeles, Paris and Amsterdam.

The breakdown was the latest in a series of embarrassing mishaps plaguing AT&T, the premier U.S. provider of telecommunications services. Last year a software glitch at a New York City switching center disrupted AT&T's nationwide network for seven hours, and last January a repair crew in Newark shut down service to millions of consumers and businesses when workers accidentally cut a high-capacity fiber-optic phone cable. Last week's misadventure will not enhance AT&T's reputation for reliability and could persuade some customers to farm out more business to the company's rivals MCI and Sprint.

AT&T's latest nightmare started Tuesday morning when the local power company, Consolidated Edison, struggling to cope with rising demand caused by a late-summer heat wave, asked AT&T to help out by switching over to its own power-generation equipment. AT&T is one of 141 companies in the New York area that earn lower electric rates by participating in a voluntary power-sharing arrangement. When AT&T's main transmission facility in Manhattan switched to its generator, a power surge tripped an emergency backup system powered by batteries. Alarms were triggered to alert AT&T employees that the backup system had been activated, but audio sirens malfunctioned, and visual warnings went unnoticed for more than five hours.

When the batteries ran down, the resulting power failure immediately shut off three huge telephone switches that route some 2 million calls an hour. The collapse disconnected the area's airports from the Federal Aviation Administration's control center on Long Island. As a result, air-traffic controllers were unable to track the location of planes, and pilots couldn't communicate with the towers, because radio transmitters were also knocked out.

The FAA contends that safety was never compromised. But the episode raises serious questions about the agency's lack of a backup system, as well as its overwhelming reliance on AT&T, which handles more than 90% of the FAA's communications traffic. The outage is expected to revive an FAA plan to spend as much as $1 billion on a more reliable, high-tech phone system. The project had been vetoed by the General Services Administration as too costly.

Congress and regulatory authorities are gearing up investigations to look into the latest outage. The New York Public Service Commission, for one, is probing whether AT&T's participation in the power-sharing discount plan was at fault -- or is appropriate, given the consequences. AT&T is launching an in- house probe. According to the union representing telephone workers, several technicians who would have responded to the alarms were absent from their posts because, ironically, they were attending a class on new alarm systems.