[iwar] [fc:Terror.attack.highlights.problem.in.telecom.sector's.monopoly.legacy]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-22 21:57:03
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Power.Station.Incident.Should.Generate.Further.Security.Awarenes]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Secrecy.surrounds.25m.Barclaycard.blackmail.case]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200110230457.f9N4v3C14623@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 21:57:03 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Terror.attack.highlights.problem.in.telecom.sector's.monopoly.legacy]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Terror attack highlights problem in telecom sector's monopoly legacy
Nation's networks may be too concentrated 
By Shawn Young and Dennis K. Berman, The Wall Street Journal, 10/22/2001
<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/644931.asp">http://www.msnbc.com/news/644931.asp>

NEW YORK, Oct. 19 - George Famulare, a 28-year veteran of New York's
local phone company, was doing his expenses in one of the world's
largest communications hubs on the morning of Sept. 11 when he heard a
loud thud.

INITIALLY, he was infuriated, thinking a renovator's scaffold had fallen
off the landmark 1926 building at 140 West St., just feet away from the
World Trade Center. Its 32 floors house the humming gray equipment boxes
that carry nearly 30% of Lower Manhattan's phone and data traffic,
capacity equal to that of Cincinnati. Mr. Famulare, in charge of Verizon
Communications Inc.'s buildings south of Midtown, saw people running
away but implored employees to stay put. "We're safer in the building.
The building is a tank." The events of Sept. 11 would quickly prove
otherwise. By the end of the day, Verizon's hub sustained the worst
damage ever to the nation's communications network. Getting calls going
again has proved to be the most significant challenge Verizon, the
largest local phone company, has ever faced, and it is prompting a
rethinking of the security of America's highly concentrated
telecommunications systems in an age of terrorism. 
The disaster also has sparked a new round of debate about telecom
deregulation itself. Verizon executives have loudly criticized the rules
that require them to rent parts of their networks - and space in their
central offices - to competitors. They argue that the arrangement has
discouraged rivals from building alternative networks by making it too
cheap and easy to piggyback on the regional giants. But competitors draw
the opposite lesson, saying the catastrophe points to the danger of
having one company in control of so much. "Verizon is the incumbent, and
the wiring has been in the ground for forever and a day. They have not
built a redundant network," says Tom Jones, director of Spectrotel Inc.,
a competing carrier based in New Jersey. All across the country, towns
and smaller cities rely on only one hub, meaning that they could lose
touch completely if that hub were wiped out. In many larger cities,
phone traffic is funneled into very concentrated routes in and out of
town. And yet, as of Sept. 11, an industry-led federal committee that
addresses phone reliability hadn't discussed terrorism contingency plans
in at least a year and a half.

'EVERYTHING ON THE TABLE' Workers scramble to repair damage to Verizon's
West Street facility. "This is now a whole new layer of preparedness
that our industry and our country needs to be thinking about," says Ivan
Seidenberg, Verizon's president and co-chief executive. "Whether we need
antiaircraft missiles on the tops of buildings, I don't think so," he
adds. "But I'm willing to put everything on the table." 
Already, changes are being made. The federal government has asked the
nation's wireless carriers to assign priority to government agencies and
emergency personnel in the event of another disaster. On Sept. 11, many
rescue workers couldn't get calls through. AT&amp;T Wireless Services Inc.,
which ran many of its switches through West Street, will now spread them
throughout the city. Verizon is adding more backup capacity and
alternate routes and has asked regulators to raise wholesale rates in
New York to cover the expense. Many businesses are taking the matter
into their own hands. Merrill Lynch &amp; Co. is conducting a global review
of its communications providers to ensure the brokerage firm has
multiple sources in each location. Phones in the firm's New York
headquarters across from the Trade Center went out on Sept. 11, even
though it split its local and long-distance service between Verizon and
AT&amp;T Corp., which lost a major switching hub in the Trade Center. The
firm is even using a set of lasers to beam data across the Hudson River
between locations in New York and New Jersey. 
At the New York office of headhunting firm Spencer Stuart, where
employees are still working from cellphones, officials are ordering
different lines from different carriers that reach their office by
different routes and hubs. "It's just something that wasn't worth the
cost before the unthinkable happened," says Rick Abel, chief technology
officer of the Chicago-based firm. E Commerce Group Inc., which had more
than 40 high-speed data lines disabled on West Street, is building a new
facility in Charlotte, N.C., so the New York-based company can have
"geographic diversity" to spread out its risk beyond backup offices it
already maintains in New Jersey. 
By nearly all accounts, New York City's phone network - and the people
who run it - performed well under incredible stress. By the Friday after
the attack, Verizon had moved the equivalent of 2.1 million voice and
data lines around Lower Manhattan. Stringing fiber-optics through open
trenches and windows, the company was able to restore the New York Stock
Exchange less than a week after the assault. Verizon workers wearing
respirators had to climb 23 flights of stairs in the dark to lug down
servers to run the exchange's price-quotation system. It was an
impressive performance compared with what was once considered the
nation's worst telecommunications disaster, a relatively limited fire
inside a Chicago switching station on Mother's Day in 1988 that closed
O'Hare Airport and wiped out service for 38,000 local customers for as
long as a month. Since then, the industry has used technology and better
planning to create far more reliable networks, focusing on adding backup
circuits to fiber lines that seemed vulnerable to an errant backhoe or
natural disaster. Most networks can now respond within milliseconds if a
particular link is broken, rerouting traffic through hundreds of
alternate links.

VULNERABLE 'NODES' What the World Trade Center attack showed, however,
is the vulnerability of the final, local link to phones and computers
through the nation's telecom hubs, or "nodes," which act as collecting
points for traffic. More than one month after the attacks, thousands of
residents and businesses are without basic phone service. 
"The weak point is the local exchange carrier," says Todd Tanner,
president of the Tanner Group, a Salt Lake City firm that helps clients
such as the Department of Defense and Walt Disney Co. build toll-free
call centers. "If you knocked out the central office in downtown Salt
Lake City, you'd not only take out the local office, but the switch that
connects all the long-distance carriers to the people in Utah." The New
York City telecom system is itself a relic of historical quirks, with
different systems built on top of one another, forming a kind of
technology sediment. Manhole access to the telecom network is still
managed entirely by the Empire City Subway Co., a subsidiary of Verizon
that dates back to 1890. While maintaining hundreds of separate routes
around the city, many competitors' lines still travel over the same
paths laid down more than 100 years ago. Under the Sept. 11 wreckage,
Verizon officials uncovered defunct wooden cable sheaths dated 1926. 
Foolproofing the physical infrastructure against future terrorist
attacks could require hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment.
Some say it makes sense to spread out the nation's most densely
concentrated hubs. Others look to switching methods used by the
Internet, which was designed to withstand nuclear attacks, as a model.
But finding any consensus about what to do will be difficult. Verizon's
Mr. Seidenberg says the terrorist attacks prove that only the biggest
phone companies are up to the task of securing the nation's phone
system, and says current regulations discourage the development of true,
alternate networks. He defends Verizon's performance, pointing out that
the company has 70 hubs in New York City and four besides West Street in
the financial district, which allowed the company to restore service to
the New York Stock Exchange and crucial parts of the financial system in
a matter of days. He remains concerned about security, though, and is
now making plans to tighten it around the company's hubs. Among other
things, Verizon is making plans to require background checks on
employees of competitors who use Verizon's facilities.

AID FROM COMPETITORS Others say the extensive damage to Verizon's hub
demonstrated that it is dangerous to rely on one company. They point out
that only with the help of smaller competitors did parts of New York get
their dial tones back. "We have buildings that would have been waiting
for Verizon to get the service up if there were not alternatives," says
Agostino Cangemi, the New York City commissioner in charge of telecom
franchising. Allegiance Telecom Inc. of Dallas provided service to some
city agencies disconnected, while Time Warner Telecom Inc. is now
operating thousands of lines through fiber it activated after the
attack. Such activities aside, Sept. 11 hammered home the fact that
local phone business has essentially remained a monopoly. Dozens of
long-distance networks crisscross the nation, but there is only one
dominant local carrier in each city, leading to concentration in hubs
such as West Street. Even competing telecom companies that build their
own infrastructure mostly rely on connections provided by the regional
phone companies in the same central offices. In a study for Amtrak by
the Tanner Group, less than 10% of competitive local carriers were found
to have facilities truly separate from the local Bell companies. When it
was built in 1926, 140 West St. sat in near-isolation among the markets,
bars and luncheonettes along the Hudson River. Considered the first
truly Art Deco skyscraper, the building is far more glamorous than most
central offices that form the architecture of the phone system because
it once served as headquarters for the New York Telephone Co. The French
architect Le Corbusier so admired the 486-foot-tall building that he
featured it in his famous work, "Toward a New Architecture." At the time
of its construction, phone companies were already replacing telephone
operators with banks of electromechanical switches. Originally developed
by a frustrated mortician whose calls were being diverted to a
competitor by the rival's phone-operator wife, the switches of the time
used motor-driven magnets traveling on thin vertical bars to connect the
calls. A full panel office would cover about 6,000 square feet, and
serve 10,000 lines. Advances in electronics led to the development of
mega-hubs such as West Street. By Sept. 11, racks of gently humming
electronics were serving 4.5 million data circuits, along with 300,000
phone lines. Such concentration occurred across the nation: Between 1990
and 1999, the number of local Bell central offices inched up less than
1% to 9,968, while the number of phone lines increased 34%, according to
the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Famulare and Verizon
officials knew the concentration of West Street well. After crawling out
of the building through a tunnel left by a chair when the first tower
collapsed, Mr. Famulare came back twice to try and turn off all
essential power to conserve energy. On his way back a third time, giant
steel girders from the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story
building adjacent to the towers, crashed through the third-floor walls,
falling all the way to the second level of the hub's basement. Water
from broken lines in the street and from fire hoses poured into the
building, making it impossible to operate the generators and batteries
that were supposed to run the equipment in the event of a power failure.
When the power ran out, the calls stopped getting through. By the next
morning, "water was rushing down the stairs," recalls Paul Lacouture,
head of Verizon's network. "It was like it was raining inside the
building in a dust storm." The damage was so great that Verizon has had
to rebuild much of the subterranean network connecting southern
Manhattan by rerouting lines through other hubs. Where its manholes
weren't buried under the remains of the World Trade Center, workers used
special industrial vacuum cleaners to suck out debris. The rerouting
meant that thousands of data paths had to be redrawn, a task complicated
by the fact that many large operations, such as major brokerages and the
Big Board, have custom setups that had to be redone virtually from
scratch. The tentacles of West Street reached across the city. Nearly
five weeks after the attack, municipal-bond brokerage Lebenthal &amp; Co. is
still without 210 of its 225 phone lines, which were hooked into the
West Street switching station two blocks from its office at 120
Broadway. "This is a phone business," says President Alexandra
Lebenthal. "I don't know how many of our clients are frustrated because
they can't get in touch with us." For now, the company is coping with a
makeshift messaging system: All calls are now forwarded to a remote
answering service, where operators send employees e-mails with the
details of the call. Once a Lebenthal employee receives the e-mail, he
then rings the caller back on a cellular phone. "Because we've been
sending so many e-mails back and forth, once a week, that whole system
crashes," adds Ms. Lebenthal. To compound matters, the building's
cellular reception is poor, which has forced employees to cluster around
the office windows, often leaning against the wall to help find a
stronger cellular signal. Even businesses far away from the damage were
affected. Officials at the Limited Inc. were shocked to discover that
the main circuit that delivered service to an office on 42nd Street came
out of West Street. The phones at E Commerce Group, directly across from
the Trade Center, somehow kept working because officials had ordered
some copper links that had curiously been routed through a hub on 37th
Street.

DELICATE BALANCE The damage to the West Street hub showed the delicate
balance of the current system, in which changes in one location have
unforeseen impacts on another. As large companies fled to new quarters
around the city and nearby suburbs, the normal patterns of phone traffic
in the New York area were disrupted, leading to congestion that left
some callers hearing fast busy signals and recordings. After Lehman
Brothers Inc. took over a Sheraton hotel in Midtown, its bankers quickly
discovered that the phone system, engineered for tourist traffic, could
only handle about 75 outgoing calls at a time. Verizon still has 16,000
lines out of service, many of them in Chinatown, because the district's
phone lines passed right under the Trade Center, where they remain
buried and waterlogged. At Mott and Worth Streets, Verizon has opened
gaping holes in the street, where crews working around the clock are
installing the plastic sheaths that will soon house the new phone lines.
Instead of opening just the tops of manholes, the company has dug what
look like foxholes more than 10 feet long so it can fit more workers in
at one time. Back at West Street, Mr. Famulare is still working nearly
constantly. A 60-foot plywood wall blocks off access to the rear of the
building, where gigantic cranes are still excavating the remains of 7
World Trade Center and trying not to, in their jargon, "rub" West
Street. Much of the building is now back in service, and Mr. Famulare
speaks with evident pride as he looks at his old "tank" being restored
to service. "We have resurrected it," he says.

Copyright � 2001 Dow Jones &amp; Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get your FREE VeriSign guide to security solutions for your web site: encrypting transactions, securing intranets, and more!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/UnN2wB/m5_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Power.Station.Incident.Should.Generate.Further.Security.Awarenes]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Secrecy.surrounds.25m.Barclaycard.blackmail.case]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:56 PST