Telecommunications confident of trouble-free Leap Year

Source: AAP | Published: Monday February 28, 12:53 PM

Telecommunications carriers were confident that the last major Y2K trigger date - February 29 - would not cause havoc with telephone connections, industry bodies said today.

The Australian Communications Authority and the Australian Communications Industry Forum (ACIF) said the leap year transition had been included in all Y2K testing and contingency planning.

ACIF chief executive officer Johanna Plante said the fact that other potentially problematic dates such as 9.9.99 and January 1 had passed with no hitches meant industry confidence was high.

'The carriers are approaching this exactly as they did the Y2K issue so they have got the same preparations, they will have peoplestanding by the same way they did on New Year's Eve, except there won't be people celebrating around them,' she said.

'All the testing and repair work over the last two-and-a-half years was addressing a number of key dates, and this is the last major one.'

The extra leap year day of February 29 has always been a tricky date for computers, with some treating it as March 1, or March 1 as February 30.

This year carries greater risks of programming errors because 2000 is an exception to an exception.

An extra day is added every four years, except for years that end in '00' unless divisible by 400, meaning 2000 is a leap year but 1900 is not.

Other potential Y2K dates to come are June 30, 2000, the end of the financial year, and December 31, 2000, the 366th day of the year

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0002/28/A44046-2000Feb28.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 28, 2000