Hey Milne or A,

Lets see some links to the stories of where Ericsson's products are non-compliant in a major way. See the link to the post (and an exerpt of their statement):

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0018H2

Milne's Comments:

This is a similar sytem to the Ericsson system used by Monkey County, Maryland. Ericsson is located a few miles from my home, in Lynchburg VA where they have a manufacturing facility. One of the guys i work with, who has a real 'big brain' told me Y2K was no problem because his Uncle works there and told him so. Ericsson radio systems are a major league Y2k screw up. Every day I read more and more about their systems failing miserable AFTER they told their customers that the were compliant.

I work for Ericsson as a Systems Engineer (for the past 7 years) and am quite knowledgeable about their Public Radio Sytems, PCS and Cellular Systems. We have been actively and successfully remediating the exchanges (read Mobile Switching Centers) for the past 12 months and participated in a interoperability test coordinated by the North American Cellular Association. The aforementioned test involved several well known vendors (and operators) i.e., Nokia, Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel and Tandem - tests were successful and involved use of the commercial networks along with Test Plants that had network configurations identical to the commericial network. It should be noted that Ericsson does upgrade or release new Application Systems for the MSCs every six months and it was well know by the customers that Y2K compliance along with other features would be offered in a future release. As for the county commissioners, I have worked on two Land Mobile Radio Designs and they were the most difficult ones to complete in terms of getting everyone to sign off on the design and navigate all of the legal minefields. I have read a contract for another county-system design (implemented in Dade County) and it was spelled out explicity that the network would require upgrades to support Y2k compliance and new features. The problem arises in that you have revolving door on the county commissioners board and tendency by the participants to ignore or forget the original terms in the contract. Back to my original complaint, I have yet to hear of all these failures that you claim to have read - lets see some links to substantiate your claims. Regards,

-- w holst (w_holst@hotmail.com), August 01, 1999

Answers

LOL! I see Milne has time to answer useless posts about theoretical switches and whether or not he would flip one if it meant destroying the "tyranny" of government. But absolutely no time to answer a very well thought out and valid question.

Milne is a pig farmer, don't give the guy any more credit than what he deserves. If he wants to surround himself in the company of hogs and swine then that is where he should limit his giving of "expert" advice.

-- ($@,.), August 01, 1999.

To the asshole using those funny dingbats as a handle,

Milne's commentary is invariably spot on - if he were writing for the Washington post he would get a Pulitzer (after 2000 of course when all the other dimwits suddenly have little light bulbs go off in what is rumoured to be their brains).

Dingbat - what the fuck have you EVER contributed on this or any other forum?

And what the hell is WRONG with pig farmers fer chrissakes??? Just shows your mentality, to look down and sneer at hard working members of society.

You are a waste of oxygen, and an arrogant piss-ant snob.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 02, 1999.

Thanks for answering Mr. Holst's question Andy. Your verbacity, thoughtfulness, and ability to remain on the subject at hand without being sidetracked is truly an inspiration to us all. What about it Milne?

-- Blue Sky (Tears@my.fro), August 02, 1999.

w holst wrote, in part: " We have been actively and successfully remediating the exchanges (read Mobile Switching Centers) for the past 12 months ..."

Here is a clue. The past twelve months is not ahead of the curve.

Montgomery County was surprised that they would have to replace their system.

AT&T Wireless just jammed an (Ericsson) antenna replacement on the rooftop space they lease on "my" office building. The equipment they were replacing is only three years old. The cabinets for the equipment are built to be expandable, but they took out three year old equipment and installed new.

Uncharacteristic of AT&T, this job was being jammed, work running ahead of receipt of permits and approved plans, etc. Nothing illegal, but uncharacteristic of this company and the way they normally operate.

Contractors on the job said they have a (hundred? don't remember) of these to do, and they want 'em all yesterday.

This operation did not look to me like a process that is under control. And finally, we are in Northern VA in an area that has stable power supply. They want to core drill through all the floors of the building (quite a few floors, I won't say how many) to run a feed that can be accessed by a portable generator brought in as necessary to power the antenna equipment. on an as needed basis.

AT&T is not replacing three year old equipment unless it had a problem, in my opinion. I could be wrong.

Montgomery County is not replacing what they described as a "new" system unless there was something wrong with it, either.

Maybe w holst can come up with some evidence this is not happening or that this is normal or that this is a process that is under control.

In any event, we don't have links or URL's for what we observe out here on the street, just as w holst doen't have them to illustrate his observations.

Maybe there really are some major problems and guys like w holst are working on 'em. I, for one, am pulling for him, but the BFD being made about a generator circuit for this equipment is a clue in my book, and replacing new equipment is another clue.

We still have all of, no wait, amend that to the rest of, 1999 for testing.

Don't worry. Be happy. We have trained professionals working on it, with emergency bunkers for backup.

-- Tom Beckner (xouttbeckner@erols.com), August 02, 1999.

Tom,

I never claimed that we were "ahead of the curve" as you stated within your post. Rather, I was asserted that our remediation efforts in North America for the past 12 mos () have yielded no significant problems. Regarding the Montgomery County "changeout" - do you have a press clipping or link to said story? It would really help if you could provide additional facts or information to provide an explanation to the activity i.e., is the system a land-mobile system (govnt dispatch) or is it a PCS/Cellular system? Ericsson's exchanges do not require a complete replacement of H/W but rather an approved correction to the application system (read S/W) must be loaded within the switch.

Concerning the many AT&T Wireless Systems (AWS) statements within your post...Many different activities are currently underway between Ericsson and AWS and I will try to give a brief description:

1. AWS is undergoing tremendous growth within their subscriber base - minutes of usage going from 1 billion/month -> 3 billion/month by end of the year. From your description it sounds as if they are upgrading to the new transceiver i.e., software defineable and configureable "on the radios". None of the transmission equipment needs to be replaced but the TRXs do need to be swapped out.

2. Regarding the uniterruptable power source - all cell sites are configured with a backup battery bank that provides operating power for about 3 hrs. Some of their more critical sites do have on site generators to insure operation if the power goes out. Case in point the only commo system available during the last significant earthquake in CA was LACTC and PacBell's cellular system.

If necessary I can provide literature, data to back up my observations besides having 12 years of experience in the telecomm, power and system on chip (read VLSI/CMOS)industries (backed up by my MSEE and MSc in Applied Physics). I welcome any additional comments or observations as they apply to the telecom industry. Regards,

-- w holst (w_holst@hotmail.com), August 02, 1999.

Well, I tried yanking Paul's chain to get him to respond to the thread,but he decided to sidetrack the issue and reply to CSY2k that I post here a lot instead of responding to this post. Such is the life of a world class economist turned pig farmer/part time electrician.

Who knows perhaps this post will convince him to reply to the issue for a change (crossposted to CSY2k).

-- Bob Brock (bbrock@i-america.net), August 03, 1999.

w host:

1) I don't question your credentials. I do thank you for your participation.

2) The Montgomery County reference, you can find the transcript from the 60 Minutes television interview somewhere on this site. Below is an exerpt re Montgomery County and Ericsson equipment:

quoted material:

KROFT: (Voiceover) To make sure all the problems were solved, Montgomery County inventoried and checked all of its computer systems and every piece of equipment that had a computer chip in it--1,100 items in the fire department alone. They thought they had tested everything.

So what happened on the first business day of 1999? Well, the computer that handles building permits crashed. The building permits are good for one year, and the computer couldn't handle expiration dates in the year 2000. But that wasn't the only problem. The county soon learned from Microsoft that the in-house computer network that handles e-mail and stores county records and was supposed to be Y2K compliant was not.

(Footage of Duncan at his desk)

KROFT: (Voiceover) And then there was that call county executive Doug Duncan got from Ericsson about the county's phone switcher, which was also supposed to be Y2K compliant.

Mr. DOUG DUNCAN: And then all of a sudden, they came back later and said, 'Oop, sorry, we made a mistake.' So now we're spending that $7 million getting a total new phone system for the county.

(Footage of Year 2000 Web site for Montgomery County)

KROFT: (Voiceover) And these are the kinds of problems being encountered in the best-prepared county in America.

If you're not convinced that you're going to be ready for this thing now, after spending $40 million and spending five years on it, what about the other communities around the country that haven't done anything?

Mr. DUNCAN: I get--I get a little nervous about some of that.

end quoted material

3) Battery backup: for this site whatever is in there doesn't work for even five minutes. That was also observed by Ericsson during scheduled power outage last month. He was even saying four hours, I laughed and told him he had five tons of air conditioning built into the cabinet doors and I haven't seen a battery anywhere. No, he said, they are in there. Whatever.

Their electician was hooking up the feed from a 40kw portable genset on a trailer, and they got it back online pretty quick, I was busy with VEPCO and another contractor and didn't spend much time on the roof when this was going on. If the spec is 3 hour reserve I am sure someone will get it squared away sometime real soon now.

w holst, I don't have any answers for you, I don't even know what the questions are. Duncan says compliant stuff coming out, new stuff going in. AWS takes out new stuff puts in newer stuff. Milne says y'll got some problems.Holst says there's two sides to this coin. I believe Holst, and the others mentioned above too.

Regards,

-- Tom Beckner (xouttbeckner@erols.com), August 03, 1999.

Andy

have you cast a glance over the latest posting guidelines ?

If so, maybe you could try to expand your vocabulary a little. After all, you do your argument (not to mention your credibility) no favours at all by cussing and foaming like some degenerate.

It seems that the question poised in the original thread heading was a genuine one, and it seems strange that you feel that Paul Milne (of all people) needs you to defend him from the nasty scary polly bullies.

Perhaps you could help him out however . . by answering the question.

Regards

W

-- W0lv3r1n3 (W0lv3r1n3@yahoo.com), August 03, 1999.

But I AM a degenerate W... :)

point taken, however dingbat still rubs me up the wrong way

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 03, 1999.