Greetings all,

I don't think I passed this along before, but the following may be of value to the group.

I was an Ameritech (The phone company in the Great Lakes region of the USA) employee for over 12 years. I visited their home page a couple of months ago and found a Y2K info contact address. So I fired off an e-mail to them asking very specific questions about how they were testing for Y2K. I asked about the numerous versions, or revisions, of many of the cards used in their Central Offices (COs). I wanted to be assured that they had tested every possible combination of cards.

The answer I got back was that they had only tested current production cards and equipment. They said there was no way they could have tested the older cards etc.

What this means in non-technical terms, is that they have tested nothing. I doubt there is any CO that has all nice and shiny new cards in it. Thus, each and every CO out there (and Ameritech has hundreds in 5 states) is a totally unknown factor. Will they go down? If they go down will it be 20%, 50%, 100%? How long before communication can be restored? What about more specialized applications like T-1s, ISDN, and DSL? The bad news is that Ameritech has always been one of the better of the Baby Bells. If they're that bad, how messed up will Bell Atlantic be? So, even if the banks themselves manage to stay functional, I doubt they will have any communications capabilities.

-- mushroom (mushroom_bs_too_long@yahoo.com), November 24, 1999

Answers

Ameritech has been focused on acquisitions and being acquired, not Y2k. Unfortunately, I live in their coverage area.

-- Brian Bretzke (bretzke@tir.com), November 24, 1999.

If this is really true, then in the immortal words of Mara,

"We are enscrewed!!"

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), November 24, 1999.

IEEE to congress June 9, 1999

1.4 "COMPLEXITY KILLS.

"The internal complexity of large systems, the further complexity due to the rich interconnections between systems, the diversity of the techinical environments in type and vingtage of most large organizations and the need to make even small changes in most systems will overwhelm the testing infrastructture that was never designed to test everything at once. Hence, much software will have to be put back into use without complete testing, a recipe, almost acommandment for WIDESPREAD FAILURES."

Why does this paragraph from the IEEE computer scientist bother me so much??

-- d----- (dciinc@aol.com), November 24, 1999.

OH, S**T.

Folks, my apologies. I did NOT put on that post the disclaimer that I had recieved this item from someone else.

I did not, never have, probably never will work for Ameritech nor any other Telecom. This is second or third hand news and makes no claims to be anything else.

Please accept my apologies, no attempt at deception was meant.

-- mushroom (mushroom_bs_too_long@yahoo.com), November 24, 1999.

I am sending this to a friend who works for Ameritech.

-- X (X@X.com), November 24, 1999.

Just substitute the name of any other telco company ie Bell Atlantic, ATT, MCIWorldcom, ect, ect for Ameritech and you will get the picture.

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), November 24, 1999.

I dunno, the last time Jackie Woods (Ameritech CEO) was in my car she was talking to some SWB mucky-mucks and the gist of the conversation was they were fine......

Chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), November 24, 1999.

mushroom, If you can get the former Ameritech employee's input on the following, that might give us a better handle on the problem:

Does a card tend to be more or less reliable than the card it has been designed to replace?

If a card that supports a given channel should fail, does this affect service on other channels?

Are there cards that if they failed, would bring down all service going through the given machine?

How often does some card fail in a particular machine?

Thank you.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), November 25, 1999.