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By Luther Turmelle
NEW HAVEN — There's one Y2K scenario that SNET Corp. — despite having spent years and a substantial amount of money trying to fix — can't prevent from happening.
SNET's phone network won't work — albeit temporarily — if substantial numbers of customers try to call relatives and friends at the stroke of midnight to wish them a happy new year.
It will be just as bad if a lot of people simply pick up the phone to see if they still have a dial tone.
And the problem isn't limited to Connecticut.
Industry analysts say our nation's telecommunications network simply isn't robust enough to allow everybody to use the phone at once.
"It's one of the little ironies of Y2K," said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecommunications analyst. "People are worried about the phone system not working because of Y2K, and so they'll pick up the phone and there will be this problem."
One thing unlikely to be interrupted is 911 calls.
Beverly Levy, a spokeswoman for SNET, said Friday the routing for emergency calls requires far less processing than regular connections.
Hence, an emergency call placed at midnight should ring in the correct dispatch center.
SNET, like most other companies, has been working to upgrade its computer systems so they can read dates after Dec. 31. Many computer systems may fail because they will only read the last two digits of a year, causing them to mistake 2000 for 1900.
SNET says it has fixed all its computer systems, but the concern over system overload remains.
If customers don't get a dial tone when they pick up the phone the first time, Kagan said, chances are they'll pick it up again a few minutes later, compounding the problem.
"This could keep repeating itself for a while that night," he said,
SNET's phone network typically handles between 60 million and 65 million calls a day, spokeswoman Sue Schaffer said.
But no phone network is designed to handle everyone picking up the phone at once, Kagan said. Typically, phone networks are designed to handle peaks in weekday calling traffic that occur twice a day, he said.
"Y2K is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and no phone company is going to design a phone network for a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," Kagan said.
So how many people picking up the phone at once does it take to temporarily paralyze SNET's phone network? Schaffer says it's impossible for SNET officials to give a threshold at which its entire network would be affected because different sections of it have different capacities.
"Each central office is able to handle different volumes of calls," she said.
Central offices are neighborhood switching centers that link local callers to other people with phones. SNET has 83 central offices statewide, Schaffer said.
The second a caller picks up the phone, a circuit — a segment of the network — is immediately devoted to complete that call. As the customer dials, the numbers entered instruct the network where to route the call.
Once the call is completed, the equipment resets itself.
That's why SNET customers don't need to actually dial a number in order to clog up the network, Schaffer said. It would take SNET's telephone network "a few minutes" to reset itself if large numbers of customers checked for dial tone simultaneously on New Year's, Schaffer said.
NEW HAVEN — There's one Y2K scenario that SNET Corp. — despite having spent years and a substantial amount of money trying to fix — can't prevent from happening.
SNET's phone network won't work — albeit temporarily — if substantial numbers of customers try to call relatives and friends at the stroke of midnight to wish them a happy new year.
It will be just as bad if a lot of people simply pick up the phone to see if they still have a dial tone.
And the problem isn't limited to Connecticut.
Industry analysts say our nation's telecommunications network simply isn't robust enough to allow everybody to use the phone at once.
"It's one of the little ironies of Y2K," said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecommunications analyst. "People are worried about the phone system not working because of Y2K, and so they'll pick up the phone and there will be this problem."
One thing unlikely to be interrupted is 911 calls.
Beverly Levy, a spokeswoman for SNET, said Friday the routing for emergency calls requires far less processing than regular connections.
Hence, an emergency call placed at midnight should ring in the correct dispatch center.
SNET, like most other companies, has been working to upgrade its computer systems so they can read dates after Dec. 31. Many computer systems may fail because they will only read the last two digits of a year, causing them to mistake 2000 for 1900.
SNET says it has fixed all its computer systems, but the concern over system overload remains.
If customers don't get a dial tone when they pick up the phone the first time, Kagan said, chances are they'll pick it up again a few minutes later, compounding the problem.
"This could keep repeating itself for a while that night," he said,
SNET's phone network typically handles between 60 million and 65 million calls a day, spokeswoman Sue Schaffer said.
But no phone network is designed to handle everyone picking up the phone at once, Kagan said. Typically, phone networks are designed to handle peaks in weekday calling traffic that occur twice a day, he said.
"Y2K is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and no phone company is going to design a phone network for a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," Kagan said.
So how many people picking up the phone at once does it take to temporarily paralyze SNET's phone network? Schaffer says it's impossible for SNET officials to give a threshold at which its entire network would be affected because different sections of it have different capacities.
"Each central office is able to handle different volumes of calls," she said.
Central offices are neighborhood switching centers that link local callers to other people with phones. SNET has 83 central offices statewide, Schaffer said.
The second a caller picks up the phone, a circuit — a segment of the network — is immediately devoted to complete that call. As the customer dials, the numbers entered instruct the network where to route the call.
Once the call is completed, the equipment resets itself.
That's why SNET customers don't need to actually dial a number in order to clog up the network, Schaffer said. It would take SNET's telephone network "a few minutes" to reset itself if large numbers of customers checked for dial tone simultaneously on New Year's, Schaffer said.
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