[conspire] AT&T and CPUC

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Regarding emergency fall back.  After the '89 earthquake, cell
> systems were either grossly overloaded or totally down.  Land lines
> kept working, except for one constraint.  Calls INTO Bay Area area
> codes were blocked.   So I could call any place north of route 85,
> but not into 408 (San Jose).

A lot of the local exchanges were also just overloaded.  At my house in 
SF's Outer Sunset (once I got home from my consulting job in Berkeley,
via a multi-hour detour through Richmond and Marin County), we tried to
not worsen the problem, i.e., mostly stayed off the line, but did check
periodically and found that sometimes you could not dial to anywhere.

If more Bay Area people had done likewise, and told panicky callers from
the East Coast "We're fine, now get off the line and we'll talk in a day
or two", even _that_ would not have happened -- but, y'know, you can't
fix stupid.

In our experience, all PSTN was fine the next day.

And, if that had taken a few more days, we weren't in that big a hurry.

-- 
Cheers,                       "Stun settings are for people who can't commit."
Rick Moen                                       -- J. Michael Straczynski
rick at linuxmafia.com                             
McQ! (4x80)