AT&T says it has successfully demonstrated the ability to recover from a major backbone outage by routing 40G of traffic using mobile trailers equipped with gigabit-speed routers.
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AT&T accomplished this feat during its largest-ever network disaster recovery exercise, which is being held in Washington D.C. this week.
"We're making sure that if a significant backbone link were to fail as part of a disaster because an AT&T office were destroyed, we can roll in our mobile assets and keep the backbone flowing," says Mark Francis, vice president of AT&T's global network operations center.
"If a backbone link goes down, that would impact the flow of all of our data services in this country," Francis explains. "We've certified that at least in our own infrastructure we can flow traffic across the trailers at 40G speeds, and we've also certified that the center that's responsible for managing those components can have vision into the traffic.''
AT&T demonstrated this capability using four mobile trailers equipped with gigabit-speed routers from Cisco, Juniper and Siemens.
The scenario AT&T tested is how it would recover if one of its main switching centers were put out of service for days or weeks as in the case of a hurricane. Now AT&T says it can use trailers with gigabit-speed routers to support the backbone traffic until the center is repaired.
Francis says AT&T's ability to quickly recover from a backbone outage is an important feature for its enterprise customers.
"If you're a CIO of a large corporation and you have a contract with AT&T, you're flowing the majority of your data centers through our IP backbone network. If we have a major bandwidth issue on our network, you're going to feel it in terms of latency or your service will stop working," Francis explains. "So for us to be getting that bandwidth back in line is paramount to our customers' success."
Also as part of this disaster recovery exercise, AT&T is testing pico microcell technology that allows it to put a small satellite dish on top of an SUV-sized vehicle and have mobile cellular service that can support six to eight cell phone users. The pico microcell technology works while the vehicle drives at speeds up to 50 miles an hour, Francis says.
"The pico microcell technology is really just for first responders," Francis says. "It allows people to get in as quickly as they can to a disaster site, assess the situation and then we can send in the satellite trailers. [Federal Emergency Management Agency] is going to like it. Fire departments and police departments are going to like it."
AT&T conducts quarterly network disaster recovery exercise around the globe to test its ability to respond to emergencies ranging from hurricanes to wildfires. AT&T said this week's exercise in Washington, D.C. was its largest-ever and the 54th exercise it has conducted in the field.