IP: Personal experiences with the infrastructure under load

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

yesterday was a day I had planned on working at home in L'berg PA 40 miles 
south west of Philadelphia. I have a idsl line to my house.

Almost immediately after the WTC first hit, I got a IM (MS variant) from my 
son, Manny, who lives in NYC at 89rd and 3rd. All throughout the day we 
kept in touch via MS-IM.  I tried to get to the main news sites that I use 
-- NYT, WashPost etc and access was very slow or non existence for the 
first hours. The slack was taken up my excellent local ISP -- KennettNet 
(www.kennett.net) who spent a large amount of the day providing summaries 
and items they were able to gather from scanning the net. They updated it 
on a 10 minute basis. It was invaluable. It also showed the value of local 
business in that it provided local context as well as national.

I found radio useless in that it was repetitive and tended to be as 
confused as I was. TV was a little better especially for the pictures it 
relayed. But the combination of net sites and more important email messages 
from people on the spot was great.

The net load I experienced was not bad at all. Except for those big sites 
who overloaded initially , it was a near normal response day. The big sites 
also learned a lot fast. They rapidly changed from their normal image rich 
format to minimal image, no advertisement and key news more. I congratulate 
especially the NY Times web page for a rapid reaction and great job. I 
critique the Wall Street Journal's who still insisted on limiting to paid 
subscribers in a time like it was.

As to the telephone system. It was clearly overloaded in a statistical 
sense. I had no problems with dial tone and local calls. Access to NYC and 
Washington and most overseas places got all trunks busy messages. Access 
out of NYC was difficult also. All this is normal. It was no worse than is 
normally experienced in such peak load times. I also assume that some of 
the facilities were dedicated to emergency use but it has been a long time 
since I have been designing telephone systems. Bottom line -- it worked as 
it should have worked and recovered fairly rapidly so within a few hours 
loads had decreased to decent levels.

Cell phones in my area were no problem but I gather that in NYC it again 
overloaded since the number of calls the system can handle is limited and 
even during normal times you can fail to get access.

All in all the system works very very well. We should be satisfied with our 
national communications infrastructure BUT realize there was not a 
simultaneous attack on the net. What things would have been like if a 
denial of service attack on the net had happened at the same time  worries 
me a lot.

Dave



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