ISPs Tell Online Customers To Get Off The Phone

In a letter to customers just an hour after the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, one ISP owner tells his customers that their dial up accounts are preventing people from contacting relatives in New York and Washington, D.C.

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [September 11, 2001]

Internet service providers around the country, many with relatives of their own in the New York and Washington, D.C., area, have been taking steps to help with efforts to provide relief to the hundreds of thousands of people affected by Tuesday's apparent terrorist attacks.

Jeremy Kinsey, owner of Lake Geneva, WI-based ISP Bella Mia Inc., sent out a plea to his customers and peers to keep the dial up activity to an absolute minimum to keep phone lines to and from the affected cities open for emergency phone calls.

Families from around the world have been frantically trying to phone relatives to find out if they are safe, many who are meeting with busy tones.

Kinsey sent out a notice to his customers just an hour after the collapse of the second World Trade Center tower in New York, asking customers to stay off the phone lines.

"We at Bella Mia, as well as other ISPs across the nation are urging dial up customers to get off the phone lines. There was a major terrorist attack in New York and Washington today that took the lives of thousands of innocent people when three separate planes flew into the World Trade Center in NYC, and the Pentagon in Washington. The damage and death toll is devastating.

"Several people may have family and friends in New York so again, we are urging all customers that use dialup to connect to the internet to please stay off the lines. Your efforts will help keep the phone lines open for calls in and out of New York. We have experienced trouble calling locally due to the large call volumes from this travesty on our great nation."

The notice was sent only to dial up customers, broadband users of fixed wireless and cable Internet modems are not affecting the phone lines. While Kinsey didn't say anything about digitial subscriber line (DSL) users, since he doesn't provide that type of service, it's assumed many people realize the copper-based service runs via telephone lines.

"I got the idea from my mother, to tell you the truth," Kinsey said in an interview Tuesday morning. "We have relatives in New York and she found that she was having a hard time getting through and thought it might be a good idea to have people get off the dial up phone lines so people could get a hold of their relatives."

In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, Web sites from around the nation have found their sites swamped by curious surfers who are trying to find out the latest information about the plane hijackings. Many of these Web site visitors are from outside the U.S., who receive little to no information from their national news desks.

Shane Vaughn, from Fort Smith, AK-based Skyhop.net, said he was chatting online with a friend in the Middle East who has been frustrated with efforts to find information on the television, and turned to the Internet to find the latest.

"I've been chatting with a friend in Pakistan all morning and that's the only feed he's been able to get," Vaughn said. "He's at work and doesn't have access to CNN. I can tell he's not getting nearly as good coverage as we're getting on network here."

For many people, that means getting online and visiting a U.S.-based news Web site for information. According to one report by Internetnews.com, major news sites like the New York Times online and Reuters.com have been almost impossible to access because of the amount of traffic.

CNN, the major international news outlet, is out of Internet service right now because one of its major traffic routes, found using a simple DNS traceroute, goes through the North tower of the WTC, which collapsed earlier this morning.

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