Verizon Communications Inc., the No. 1 local phone company and main artery of the public switched telephone network in lower Manhattan, anticipates spending $1.4 billion to restore its infrastructure a year after the Twin Towers collapse crushed cables and filled its Central Office switches at 140 West St. with dust and debris.
Verizon spokesman Mark Marchand said Wednesday he estimates half to three quarters of the renovation is completed and the phone giant anticipates insurance will cover at least half the bill.
The monumental damage caused by the terrorist attacks on New York a year ago "accelerated" Verizon's policy of putting in place redundant networks to reroute traffic, Marchand said. For instance, Verizon has installed an additional 45 miles of fiber in lower Manhattan on SONET rings.
Even though one of the phone giant's main COs at the World Trade Center complex effectively was knocked out last year, Verizon rerouted much of its traffic by the following Monday in time for the New York Stock Exchange to reopen, Marchand said. And the company did not lose a single 911 call that day, he said.
Verizon has learned "redundancy and diversity works," Marchand said. "Do more of it."
Marchand said Verizon's wholesale customers - the scores of communications companies providing telephone, data and Internet services to homes and businesses - will tap an alternative provider for redundancy purposes, or if they use another facilities-based provider, ink an agreement with Verizon for backup capabilities.
Chris McFarland, chief technology officer of facilities-based provider Allegiance Telecom Inc., said the national carrier did not change or reoptimize its network capabilities in the wake of last year's attacks. However, Allegiance has maintained a more effective contact list of common carriers throughout the country for emergency situations, he said.
One analyst covering the wholesale telecom market said local and long distance companies who use other networks to serve their customers are installing backup networks for other reasons than the possibility of a terrorist attack.
"The resellers I talk to you are more concerned about [the] financial stability of companies they are buying from than a terrorist attack," said Seth Libby, a senior wholesale analyst at The Yankee Group. "I don't think resellers have enough money to really be worrying about installing redundancy across all of their systems."
If they are installing redundant networks, it is frequently in direct response to a customer's request, Libby said.
Meanwhile, American companies that rely on Verizon and smaller communications companies to run their business appear to have their work cut out before they are adequately prepared for another disaster.
One in four medium-sized to large-sized businesses do not have business plans to respond to disasters or emergencies, according to a survey commissioned by AT&T Corp. and conducted by Digital Research Inc. At least half the companies surveyed said network and IT security had become a "more critical, strategic issue since Sept. 11," according to AT&T, which carried a record 431 million call attempts that day.
