Another warning on phone use at rollover

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I always call my Dad in England at holiday times. But he knows this year I'll be calling at least a day early! This is why:

From the Electronic Telegraph: ISSUE 1618 Saturday 30 October 1999

Soccer hotline melted by million calls an hour By Auslan Cramb, Scotland Correspondent

THE Scottish telephone system suffered disruption yesterday as football fans tried to buy tickets for the Scotland-England match in Glasgow.

Seventeen-thousand calls were made at exactly 9am when the hotline opened to sell tickets for the first leg of the Euro 2000 play-off on Nov 13. But only two fans got through to the call centre run by Glasgow city council before the switchboard crashed, causing chaos in Scotland and parts of England.

One British Telecom source said it was "extraordinary" that the local authority had employed only 35 people to man a call centre expected to receive four million calls during the day. The centre was capable of dealing with 2,000 calls an hour, while the actual hourly rate was close to one million calls.

The council, which was said to have insisted on using its own switchboard, claimed that BT had assured it that there would be no problem. However, most callers received a message saying "the telephone network is busy at the moment". The Scottish Football Association said it had done everything possible to cope with the demand, following problems in England when 1.25 million callers jammed the hotline set up for the Wembley leg of the play-off.

The lines were restored after two hours, and the 14,000 tickets available were reported to have been sold, two at a time, by around 7.15pm yesterday. The newly-refurbished Hampden stadium has a capacity of 52,000, but more than 20,000 were taken up by members of the Scotland Travel Club, who regularly travel overseas with the national team. Other tickets went to corporate clients and debenture holders, and 6,000 went to the English Football Association.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), October 29, 1999

Answers

I'm sure gobs of people will pick up the phone to see if there's a dial tone, and they'll keep doing this for hours.

another problem is party pranksters shutting off the main breakers "oh no! it's Y2K!, we're doomed! it was all true!"

then they'll turn the power back on, in the meantime, everyone else has just experienced a nice power surge and depending on how many people pull this, the surge may be strong enough to blow out appliances or burn out TVs.

I'll be shutting off my main breaker long before the rollover, so I'll miss the fun.

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), October 29, 1999.


I was planning on calling everyone starting shortly before 2 pm our time...that's about midnight, UTC (formerly GMT)... Since they are in different phone areas, I'd like to see who still has telephone service...

I suspect that if there is any computer time problem, it will be at the UTC rollover, not the local one.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), October 30, 1999.


This has nothing to do with phones or y2k, but we used to live on a weak rural water systemn. Pressure was never very high. During commercials the water pressure would trickle nearly to zero because everyone was flushing the toilet.

-- helen (sstaten@fullnet.net), October 30, 1999.

Helen, LOL Somehow this seems entirely appropriate !!

-- Not Danrather (Nonetwork@TV.forus), October 31, 1999.

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