January 20, 1997
Could Internet Surfers Bring Down the Phone System?
By Bob O'Donnell
No dial tone. That's what told me trouble was ahead.
I was working at home one day in early November of last year, picked up the phone, and
heard nothing but dead air. I presumed it was the phone at first. Cordless phones, after
all, aren't known for being robust. But when I had the same problem on another phone, I
became perplexed.
Then it dawned on me. All circuits were busy -- really busy. It was early Wednesday
afternoon in Silicon Valley and the phone system was completely overwhelmed. Luckily, when
I tried again about two or three minutes later, I got through. The calls I needed to make
weren't emergencies, but the lack of dial tone was still a bit disconcerting.
Around the same time I noticed that the "Sorry, all circuits are busy. Please try
your call again" message was becoming increasingly familiar, whether I was at home or
work.
Fast forward to early December 1996. America Online debuts flat-rate online access and
7 million eager surfers burst through the gates and flood into the Internet and AOL's chat
rooms; virtually all of them using the public telephone system to make their connections.
A few days later, a major telephone switch in Phoenix was so stressed that US West had to
scramble to shore it up and some fingers were pointed to Vienna, Va., home of AOL's
operations. Was there really a connection?
Since then, AOL subscribers have become increasingly frustrated by their inability to
get online, citing AOL's insufficient resources and infrastructure to handle the increased
load. In fact, several of them have become so incensed that they've filed lawsuits against
the company.
But the bigger issue is, what about the phone infrastructure? Christine Traut,
technology strategist for the CIO of Andersen Worldwide and a member of InfoWorld's
Corporate Advisory Board, has studied this issue a great deal and, in recent
conversations, convinced me that it's a huge potential problem.
The basic question is does the public telephone system have the resources to handle the
demands being placed on it by the hordes of Internet surfers, whether they come via AOL or
any other ISP? As you've undoubtedly heard, the phone system was designed for three-minute
voice calls, not 30-minute, 60-minute, or even longer data calls. So what happens when
these longer calls start soaking up more and more of the available circuits? Could it lead
to catastrophic breakdowns in the phone system? (And let's not forget, while a one or two
hour outage of Internet service is annoying, a similar outage of widespread telephone
service could be disastrous.)
Probably not, because the phone companies do have redundant systems, but only they can
really answer that for sure. Anecdotal evidence certainly suggests there are brief
breakdowns or overloads occurring on a regular basis, but it's hard to say whether the
basic integrity of the phone system is really at risk.
Even if it's not, though, common experience lends a fair amount of credibility to the
phone companies' arguments that their systems are being overtaxed and that they need to
greatly increase their infrastructure. Unfortunately, they've begun to use this argument
to justify the need for a surcharge on all data calls and are now pressing Washington
politicians to push through legislation that would permit this. High-tech industry and
consumer organizations are obviously going to fight what amounts to an Internet usage tax,
but it may prove to be an uphill battle.
If enough average citizens start finding the phone system, on which they so strongly
depend, compromised, and the culprit is identified as the 10 percent of the population
that uses phone lines for online access, the other 90 percent could mount a formidable
opposition.
The Internet is facing a number of critical challenges in the coming years as it
struggles to achieve greater significance as a communications tool. Its overwhelming
dependence on the public phone system as an on-ramp, however, could prove to be a critical
flaw in its still-forming foundation.
©
Copyright 1997, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
155 Bovet Road, San Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
