Plans needed for communications infrastructure

Sep 1, 1999 12:00 PM, ACCESS CONTROL & SECURITY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION STAFF

Recently, a major telephone failure on New York's Long Island was caused by the accidental severing of an important fiber-optic feeder cable by a construction crew in Amityville. The incident raises important issues for commercial landlords and owners regarding the ability of their fire and burglary alarm systems to cope with future telephone failures, according to Richard Kleinman, president of AFA Protective Systems Inc.

Some 300,000 Bell Atlantic customers were affected by the summertime outage, which included the loss of 911 emergency service and inability for callers to get through on suddenly overburdened cellular phone systems.

"This region is far better prepared to deal with ice storms and blizzards - even tragic air disasters and chemical spills - than a simple break in a fiber-optic cable the thickness of a jump rope," Kleinman says. "We need to view this recent breakdown of telecommunications as a warning about where we are going as a society driven by information and dependent on telephone access to emergency services and various monitoring services.

"Technology has changed so quickly that we have failed to spot the vulnerabilities in systems that link emergency services with homes, businesses and institutions that religiously believe 911 will always respond. What is particularly chilling is that the telecommunications chaos was the result of an accident. One can imagine what a calculated act of technological terrorism might do to a region so dependent on the electronic flow of data."

The AFA executive says even the backup radio communications to a central station will not protect commercial buildings if the phone services to fire or police headquarters are blacked out. He warns the communication loop has to be far more resilient with fail-safe backups put into place.

Kleinman says a task force of experts from throughout the telecommunications industry should be convened to create a disaster recovery plan that works with emergency services to anticipate the next cable accident. "While we are dependent on electricity to preserve our society from anarchy, so too are we now dependent on telephones, modems, cell phones and pagers to keep us from fraying at the edges," he notes.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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