9/11 Telecom Heroes

There's more to Nortel than you think.

You have to understand there were carrier hotels from many providers, you had various tenants, many of them not even connected to each other, the Port Authority, NYS, and NYC governments, and of course the private sector. AT&T claimed their switches remained in tact but the cabling got totally severed off. (I have to doubt them on that.) Trading turrets are also separate systems, basically a PBX in itself.

Nortel wasn't the same because they were in the post Y2K Great Tech Depression, worse than the overall recession. 9/11 did not help matters, but in a couple of years they got their hands caught in the compliance jar for cooking the books. I'd say it was a slow dying case of Enron, the death was much, much slower. Enron started to collapse at that same time, and went bankrupt in two months by comparison. 9/11 for both companies was a pile-on than anything else.

I recommend this picture/coffee table book

Albeit this link is from a later edition (appr. a post 9/11 edition). I have a 1999 edition, and you'll see many of the old firms (yup have times changed) many Avaya Red DCP sets, the 8400 and 7400 series as office phones at the trading floors, etc. It's surprising to see so many of those customers using AT&T/Lucent PBX boxes given they didn't even had a foot at the door in the Fortune 500 in the early to mid 1990s.

It's unfair to single out a single vendor in a 50k person + other lines at such facility.