🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wednesday, May 28, the Southfield, MI (suburb of Detroit) Michigan
Bell ESS office's Northern Telecom DMS100 digital switch went down for
almost the whole afternoon, reportedly depriving 35,000 subscribers of
service (they couldn't even get a dial tone).

Thursday, May 29, it occurred again sometime in mid-morning and the
digital switch was down for almost the entire business day (it came
back around 5:30 pm local time), this time reportedly taking out
50,000 subscribers, including the police and fire departments.

In an interview, a spokesman for Michigan Bell was quoted as saying
they don't know what caused the problem.  He went on to say they are
working closely with Northern Telecom to find the cause.

A spokesman for Northern Telecom, in a recent telephone conversation,
said that some 20-30 software updates for the DMS100 were necessary to
cure certain problems with passing 212a and V22.bis modem signals
through the switch.  It is unclear at this time if these updates have
any bearing on the outages of the past two days.  According to sources
at Michigan Bell and Northern Telecom, the updates have not been done
to the DMS100 digital switch in the Southfield central office.  They
are reportedly scheduled to be done on June 7th.

Stay tuned...

--Keith Petersen
Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA
uucp: {ihnp4,allegra,cmcl2,dual,decvax,mcnc,mcvax,vax135}!seismo!w8sdz