InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

"We are just limping along," says Brian Spears, director of information services at Konica USA Inc., a distributor of business machines. The Windsor, Conn., company uses MCI WorldCom's frame relay for E-mail, database access, and other services to its 50 branch offices.

MCI WorldCom says it has not determined the cause of the outage, which it says occurred following a scheduled upgrade to Lucent switch software. MCI Worldcom estimates the problems have affected as many as 30% of its frame relay customers since engineers first noticed unusually high network congestion Aug. 5. The outages are no longer spreading to additional customers, according to an MCI WorldCom spokeswoman.

That's little consolation to companies dependent on MCI WorldCom services to interconnect their offices and help conduct their business. "We have branches that have been off the network for days," says Konica's Spears. He says orders from many branches are being manually entered into ordering systems.

"This sort of thing is bound to happen given the complexity of WAN communications today," says Virginia Brooks, VP of networking and telecommunications at the Aberdeen Group.

Analysts say companies should not depend solely on one network from one service provider and should have backup strategies in place. Says Brooks, "If connectivity and uptime are critical to your business, you have to aggressively invest in contingency plans."