AT&T (nee SBC, nee Southwestern Bell) dropped a story Friday evening while some of the East Coast was disrupted by the DDOS attack that they had intentions to acquire Time Warner, the owner of CNN (the Cheap News Network), HBO, Warner Pictures, etc. for about $85 billion dollars.
Of course, this is subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission, and similar to the NBCUniversal/Comcast acquisition from GE in 2010; expect concessions and terms of sale to also follow.
This deal however, does not include Time Warner Cable (historically branded for it’s Road Runner triple play services) which was spun off several years ago, but kept the name and the “sight and sound” logo.
Today, we are revisiting network operations from about thirty-five years ago. From time to time, this site had posted media from the old AT&T Long Lines, however on the day after a massive distributive denial of service attacked the Manchester-based Dyn; I thought it would be worthy to do another post. Produced by AT&T featuring the network operations center for their then Long Lines unit; this was high tech for the 1970s.
AT&T had designed a national network to process out of state or region calls and direct them automatically. But if disaster or overloaded situations occurred, this specific operations center would be able to redirect calls to another route. Communication between the central office and the Bedminster was crucial in case of possible outages or high call volumes, say around the holidays or disasters like earthquakes, etc.
Around this time #3 ESS switches were used around the Bell System. Not too long after #4 would replace the switching, and despite the 5ESS taking over central offices in some markets in the 80s, the 4ESS switching was commonly used for long distance, even up to the early 1990s.
Today Bedminster serves as a catchall as AT&T has evolved into different businesses since the Divesture and the death of long distance services.
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Sadly, not all operations are designed like the ol Bell System only because the technology is so complicated and Internet networking was never thought of running like telephones, because telephony routing was so fixated (or static to used todays terms.)
While the Internet was designed and can do things like hop onto another network on it’s own – if the first or second hit didn’t work then you’d get to your services. With IP based networking; you can’t just issue commands onto a router and redirect the data traffic as easily. Often when a network goes down, the easiest way is to reboot it or do whatever you can do to fend off the attacks. Another problem is just the plain insecurity of the Internet. I’m not the biggest expert in IP networking but another problem is the war between traditional networks that are hard-coded (ala Cisco IOS) and newer networks that are more “dynamic” like what occurred yesterday. Not only that but the consumer equivalent to oIP, the Internet of Things is not helping matters. That’s a whole different discussion outside the realm of this site.