Getting back to business

NEW YORK - New technologies, plus a good dose of creativity, have enabled companies across New York City to get their networks up and running in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks.

How quickly a company was able to get back to business depended largely on its location. Some, unable to return to their destroyed or damaged offices, were forced to find office space in other parts of New York or New Jersey and set up IT infrastructures from scratch. But even those lucky enough to have their offices intact faced a host of data and voice network obstacles that required some fancy footwork to overcome.

The fact that the New York Court System had been experimenting with fixed wireless and voice-over-IP technology played a key role in its network recovery efforts.

The court system lost many of its T-1 and frame relay circuits when Verizon's central office on West Street, located near the World Trade Center complex, was badly damaged as a result of the attacks. Although the Verizon office is still standing, it remained out of service as of late last week.

The court system uses its data lines to connect the New York City buildings to court houses throughout the state (see story). ISDN back-up lines brought some affected court buildings back online, although Sheng Guo, the court system's CTO, describes the technology as "painfully slow."

Guo's biggest technical headache was reestablishing communications for the six court buildings closest to the World Trade Center site. The buildings, connected to one another by fiber, were left with no data or voice connectivity.

On Wednesday, the day after the attack, Guo used Nortel equipment to provide an 11M bit/sec fixed wireless connection from one of the buildings to a data center farther away from the disaster site. The data center has an OC-3 link connecting it to the rest of the court system in upstate New York.

After establishing the wireless connection, Guo installed IP phones in the six stranded buildings Thursday and Friday. The phones connect to a Nortel Succession Communication Server for Enterprise, essentially an IP PBX, located in the data center. Voice-over-IP gateways in the data center and in another building upstate let callers in the buildings reach the public phone network.

Meanwhile, Guo says the 11M bit/sec gear was too slow to support all the data and voice traffic for the six court buildings, so last Monday he upgraded the wireless link to 100M bit/sec using Canobeam DT-50 optical beam transceivers in one of the buildings and at the data center. Guo was smart and lucky - he had been testing the Canobeam equipment as an alternative to digging up streets to install a fiber network.

"What we have accomplished in the last few days just goes along with what we had planned to do earlier," Guo says. "The [World Trade Center] attack just made us mobilize resources and accelerate our schedule."

Perhaps the most amazing part of Guo's story is that he plans to keep the makeshift network up and install 600 IP phones in the six court buildings after the technologies proved their mettle during the ultimate test.

Columbia University, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan well away from the chaos at the World Trade Center site, also used IP phones to let its students make phone calls to concerned parents and friends when the public phone switches in the area were overwhelmed by calls in the hours after the attacks.

Columbia resorted to Internet 2 - an experimental network used to test quality of service and other advanced technologies - to carry the IP voice traffic from its campus to universities in other cities, where gateway devices routed the calls back into the public phone network.

The first calls from Columbia over the makeshift voice network were made at 11:36 a.m. Sept. 11, says Alan Crosswell, director of network systems at Columbia's Department of Academic Information Systems. Three hours later, four IP phones were available to students, faculty and staff. More phones were added throughout Wednesday.

Although Columbia had no formal plans in place to set up the Internet 2 network, Crosswell says it worked well and that the voice quality was good.

Even after the stock markets reopened last Monday and businesses were allowed to return downtown, phone service in the New York area remained spotty as call volumes overwhelmed the weakened phone network. Many businesses turned to systems other than the public phone network to get their operations running.

Mintz Levin, a law firm in midtown Manhattan, turned to Research in Motion's BlackBerry wireless handheld devices to communicate.

"My law firm is tech-oriented, and we've rolled out 500 BlackBerry devices for use," attorney Jeffrey Moerdler says.

BlackBerry devices work on wireless networks that are separate from carrier cellular networks, some of which were destroyed in the World Trade Center attacks.

The BlackBerry devices also came in handy Sept. 11, when building management told Mintz Levin to evacuate its offices. The firm's manager could broadcast a notice about the evacuation, letting Mintz Levin offices and employees in other locations keep up to date with events.

This story was compiled by Mike Martin, Kathleen Ohlson, Ellen Messmer, Phil Hochmuth and Tim Greene.

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