Nortel and 9-11

[GordonKapesMZ4]

It's sad to think......9/11 also affected our world's economy, especially Nortel.

From what I understand the entire World Trade Center was run by a Nortel SL-100 and the Verizon building next door was 100 percent Nortel switching.

They showed pictures on the History Channel once of the WTC command center in early 2001 was a full of Meridian 2616.

http://newscenter.verizon.com/kit/wtc/photos2.html

Apparently Nortel donated a ton of switches after the disaster to all of the areas of lower Manhattan.

Too bad they aren't around anymore.

 

[AJ9U]

At the VoiceCon 2002 conference, the person in charge of the NYC courts system voice network (I think his name was Sheng Guo) gave a presentation of the challenges he had in restoring telephone service right after 9-11. Mayor Giuliani said NYC would be back in business Monday morning. The data network was working but there was no voice infrastructure, as it depended on the Verizon building which was in shambles. Sheng had been trialing IP telephony for a few months, knew it would work, and had done limited rollout. So he called Nortel and asked them to send what IP phone gear they could. Nortel sent 18 semis of equipment, along with staff to implement. Monday morning the courts system had a completely functioning IP telephony system.

Three years ago we were implementing some VoIP monitoring software. The manufacturer sent an engineer to our site for a week to get it all set up. He REALLY knew his IPT stuff - turns out he used to work for Nortel and did some of the tech design and most of the early implementations of Nortel's IP telephony gear. As were were swapping stories during down time, somehow the conversation turned to 9-11. I mentioned this amazing effort that Nortel had done. He said that he knew all about that, because was the lead tech engineer for that effort. So he had lots of good stories.

 

[GordonKapesMZ4]

Hi aj9u, your response was great to hear. While so many awful things happened on 911, the good spirit of people came out too and in this case Nortel. Was any of that equipment donated? I remember when the first up i2004 phones came out, they required a power supply and sometimes a remote switch port, while today you can just plug the ip phones into a Poe connection.

Anyone know what system the new world trade center is using? I am guessing Avaya 96xx or cisco, I am guessing they didn't go cs 1000 or cs 2100???

Anyone else have interesting September 11 stories?