ROCKDALE (CONYERS) AT&T CONTROL CENTER (From the The Atlanta Journal and Constitution)

The right connections: The AT&T control center in Rockdale helps keep open nation's communications network

Consider the scenarios: An AT&T fiber optic cable may be damaged hundreds of miles out on the Atlantic Ocean floor. At the same time, in
New York, a door might be opened on an unmanned telephone switching station.

Almost immediately, technicians at the AT&T Network Control Center in Conyers would make preparations to repair the deep sea line and
investigate the Big Apple alarm signal.

Since 1990, this 200,000-square-foot control center on Salem Road has monitored the AT&T Corp. communications network in every state east
of the Mississippi River. One of only two such facilities, the Atlanta control center in Conyers mirrors one in Denver, which monitors the
western United States.

Either one can oversee the entire network on its own during an emergency.

The control center manages the health of AT&T's massive communications network, which handles some 190 million calls each business day.
The center is responsible for keeping lines open, preventing and fixing network problems and identifying the need for new lines. The center' s
primary mission is to keep calls flowing on customers' first tries. It does this using the largest group of employees in Rockdale County, about
1,300.

Ed Hamilton, 53, of south Rockdale, is one of them. He's been with AT&T for 29 years.

"I have been here long enough to see my job go from a manual job that takes a lot of folks to an automated job that doesn't take as many folks,"
said Hamilton, who keeps watch over four computer monitors at his work station every day.

Hamilton began working at the AT&T plant before it became the network control center. The plant was built in the late 1950s as a radio repeater
station. It later became one of seven network control centers, and in 1989, those seven were folded into the Conyers and Denver locations.

Hamilton is a supervisor monitoring the Fast Automatic Restoration system (FASTAR), which can route calls away from jammed or troubled
lines on its own, usually without a customer ever knowing. He works in the center's main lab, where nearly a dozen big-screen monitors give
managers what's equal to a bird's-eye view of the network.

"This is a neat thing to do for a living," he said.

Center spokeswoman Sherry Henson, 43, said many of the systems at the center are "smart systems. They have intelligence built in."

On Halloween, a line cut by construction workers in Florida held lines reaching from Pensacola to New Orleans and to Mobile, Ala. FASTAR
rerouted calls to good lines in less than 60 seconds, said Henson.

On any given weekday morning, the center may route calls from Atlanta to Washington through California. Call volumes are usually thick when
the business day begins. To lessen the risk that calls on the East Coast will be hindered, they are sent through vacant lines on the West Coast
where the business world is three hours behind and still asleep. It takes less than three seconds longer to get connected, said Henson.

Natural disasters or big news events can also call for quick rerouting. That's why the lab's center screen is most often tuned to CNN. A smaller
side screen is tuned to the Weather Channel.

Minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing in April, the Denver center was taking steps to ensure plenty of lines would be open in and out of
the city, said Henson.

There also are times when no action is the best course. When the space shuttle takes off, center employees keep their hands off the network as
much as possible to avoid malfunctions that could interfere with people using the network to communicate as they manage the launch. On a
recent business day last month, center employees witnessed a significant drop in the call volume they usually see each Tuesday between 1 and
1:10 p.m. Such a drop rarely occurs, she said.

But it was Oct. 3, the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder.
 
 

Copyright 1995, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, All rights reserved.

By Duane D. Stanford STAFF WRITER, The right connections: The AT&T control center in Rockdale helps keep open nation's:
communications network., 11-16-1995, pp J/07.