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Title: Phone Glitch Not Part Of 601'S End

Source: The Commercial Appeal Memphis, TN Publication date: 2000-05-03

Phone calls met by busy signals and calls that went unanswered throughout northeast Mississippi had nothing to do with the demise of the old 601 area code at midnight Sunday, a BellSouth manager said. Customers throughout the region were unable to place calls for about an hour Monday because of noise in the data stream that interfered with proper switching, said Mike Walker, manager of the BellSouth Tupelo office, where most of the area's switching takes place.

"From about 9:55 (a.m.) until about 10:15 or so, we had distortion in the data that goes through the switch and the switch could not process calls," Walker said.

"Everything is up and running," he said "We don't anticipate any additional problems."

Walker said the service outage would have occurred regardless of the demise Monday morning of the 601 area code in the region. Starting Monday, the old 601 area code no longer works for north Mississippi after a yearlong transition period to the new 662 area code.

"The timing was unfortunate, but that was not the case," Walker said of any connection between the demise of the 601 area code and the problems encountered Monday.

Bennie McDow, E-911 coordinator for Lee County, said he believes the problem had a minimal effect on the emergency response phone system.

"The only thing that occurred was about 10:27 (a.m.)," McDow said. "We were in the process of talking to someone and we were cut off. But they were just checking their phone. By about 11:30, everything started to straighten up."

Publication date: 2000-05-03 ) 2000, YellowBrix, Inc. http://realcities.yellowbrix.com/pages/realcities/Story.nsp?story_id=10317925&site=charlotte&ID=realcities&scategory=Computers%3AY2K

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), May 04, 2000