I've been inside of a few NOCs in my time, and almost without exception, there are a couple of big screens playing these channels. Why?
asked Feb 21, 2011 at 4:30
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4 Answers
Bang for buck. You need to get as many colour graphs and cool looking statistical lines onto the screen at the same time as possible. Preferably with sliding news reels and weather information for added real time data awe. This is mostly to convince management types that important things are being done. I know this sounds sarcastic, but it sadly isn't as much as it should be.
Well, it does get boring in there sometimes, and I bet if the CIO saw us watching COPS instead of working it wouldn't go so well... :)
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... and the weather channel is somehow less boring? I assume the sound is off... Feb 21, 2011 at 5:09
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Actually @mark, some of the shows they have like Storm Stories etc aren't half bad :)– BenGCFeb 21, 2011 at 5:11
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your weather channel must be different to ours then. The ones I've seen just have 24/7 weather maps with sleep-inducing background music and the occasional live weather report. Feb 21, 2011 at 5:23
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Hmm... I guess so. In the US we actually have a station called "The Weather Channel" and while a majority of the program is the weather they do have other stuff: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…– BenGCFeb 21, 2011 at 5:43
Weather can affect many things, as can major geopolitical events, that could affect the operations of a network. At least, that's the "business reason". The actual reason is exactly what BenGC said - that it's boring as all hell to watch a bunch of monitors that 99% of the time are normal.
I'm working at a support center of a French ISP, and we do need those informations for various reasons:
- Weather:
- Rain: old copper cables (local loop) are sensible to water.
- Thunderstorms: Low-end routers and modems have weak power supplies.
- snow slows down our Field engineers :(
- Some RF links are also affected by bad weather. (fortunately no laser/optical links)
Other events that I can remember of:
- 2010 Haiti earthquake: several customers impacted
- 2010 Chile earthquake: customers & backbone (routers, links) impacted
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake & tsunami: several submarine communications cables down
But we do have also some customers in countries like Irak or Afganistan, were geopolitical situation can increase difficulty to repair. Green zone for example, is a restricted area where our Field engineers have to go...
