Gee, this must be my night for posting stuff :) Sorry, I'm too wiped to put hotlinks in here; I'll probably have to get up early & I'm a wiped puppy.

Anyway, from:

http://www.cbn.org/y2k/insights.asp?file=990223h.htm

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MCI & Sprint Apparently Cutting Their Y2K Work Close To The Deadline

http://www.techweek.com/articles/2-22-99/countdow.htm

(TechWeek)

These quotes come from TechWeek's weekly Y2K update; I'll be quoting more from it tomorrow in a report on California's Y2K situation. Needless to say the MCI & Sprint information in this first paragraph certainly caught my eye:

**Readiness of the telecommunications infrastructure is one of those secrets. John Pasqua, AT&T program management vice president of the year 2000 initiative, stated in a news conference Feb. 2 that AT&T has achieved 100 percent repair of its global voice, data network and customer billing systems as well as 99 percent of testing. But other telecom giants are still plodding away. MCI Worldcom projects a Sept. 30 date for "deployment of remediation solutions" (that's cutting it close, and it's not clear if that includes testing). Sprint Communications has a "target date" of June-not including testing, according to Y2K Program Manager Martha Lally.

**GTE plans to complete "enterprise testing of critical and key systems" by June, according to its Web site, but that date "depends upon our suppliers meeting the dates that they have quoted to us for delivery of year 2000 compliant software and hardware." But in a recent monthly newsletter, GTE advised its 1.5 million customers to "withdraw a 'few weeks' worth of extra cash" on Dec. 31.

-- Drew Parkhill/CBN News (y2k@cbn.org), February 23, 1999

Answers

Consider MCI TOAST! Put a fork in her she's done!

-- Scotty (BLehman202@aol.com), February 24, 1999.

Thanks, Drew. Your efforts are invaluable. Here is a link for the Tech Week piece:

tech week

-- Wanda (lonevoice@mailexcite.com), February 24, 1999.

I had an interesting conversation the other night with a person DIRECTLY involved with supplying y2k compliant ware to GTE. Initially the conversation was something to the effect of - we'll have everything completed by June because "we have to". Later it was "We're sweating bullets - we'll be lucky if things are ready in August" Of course the contingency plans being considered by this major company all revolved around litigation.

I wonder when August turns to October turns to...

-- gideon (gideon@zianet.com), February 24, 1999.

"MCI Worldcom projects a Sept. 30 date for 'deployment of remediation solutions' (that's cutting it close, and it's not clear if that includes testing). Sprint Communications has a 'target date' of June-not including testing..."

MCI and Sprint don't really need to TEST those millions of lines of remediated code, do they?

BTW, where are Paul Davis, Flint, et al when this kind of news is posted. Come on, guys, tell me why this is really not a problem and we'll certainly have a dial tone come January 2000.

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), February 24, 1999.

Hmm, you guys need to know that its not necessary to test the H/W & S/W remediations on a "live" system. All telecomm infrastruc- ture providers employ Test Plants (that is mirror images of their customer's networks) that allows them to not only test corrections for problems like y2k but new features before releasing them...Our company has already tested its y2k "patch" and have performed interoperability testing with other vendor's mobile and public switching centers for the past 2 mos without any major glitches. The "rollout" to the Service Providers (aka AT&T, Bell South, SWBT, and Omnipoint) started about 1 mo ago.

-- kevin (kta@yahoo.com), February 25, 1999.