10/04/2001 - Updated 06:05 PM ET After attacks, new technologies keep city connected

NEW YORK (AP) — Businesses and government offices left without phone service following the collapse of the World Trade Center are turning to new technologies to help them get back to work. The state court system had 2,300 phones in courthouses near the trade center but was left with nine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. This week, the courts are using 600 high-tech phones that use the Internet to carry calls. "Normally we would have taken a small court and done a six-month pilot with a few phones," said Judge Jonathan Lippman, the state's chief administrative judge.

"What we did here is in one week and a day we did six months' work in order to get this in, and now we are delighted," Lippman said.

The destruction of the trade center posed an unprecedented challenge to the telecommunications industry.

Cell phones stopped working, in part because the transmission towers were destroyed along with the twin towers. One Verizon switching office was destroyed and another that handled about 300,000 telephone lines and 3.5 million point-to-point data circuits was badly damaged.

While most cell service is back up, Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said more than 10,000 phone lines across a large swath of lower Manhattan are still not working. Businesses aren't waiting.

Merrill Lynch, for example, is using "free-space" fiberless optics to transmit data from Manhattan across the Hudson River to Jersey City, N.J.

The technology uses safe, invisible lasers to beam a signal through the air, said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Kirkland, Wash.-based Terabeam, which provides the service.

Verizon crews have been restoring service by running wires around the damage — out of windows or through trenches dug in the streets.

Residential customers can use 200 free phones Verizon has placed on trailers around lower Manhattan. The company is also distributing 20,000 free cell phones.

"We have pretty good hopes of being out of the crisis stage this month, maybe sooner," Rabe said.

-- Anonymous, October 05, 2001