If you want to look at most of the world’s telephone calls, you’ll need a very large screen.Twelve feet high and 250 feet wide, the largest video wall in the world is the centerpiece of AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center, where the company manages a 928,000 fiber-route mile global network, including 129,000 WiFi hotspots and 87 million wireless customers. This is where the phone company gods route traffic in times of heavy call volume, due to emergencies and natural disasters, and prepare for large phone-calling moments, like prime-target National Special Security Events.Josh Topalsky, who took a tour of GNOC with Engadget (see below) accurately and giddily compares it to the control room in War Games. The company bills it as the largest and most sophisticated command-and-control center of its kind in the world. To me, it’s a 21st century blinkenlights orgy, straight out of the fantastical dreams of the set designer on an overwrought-JJ Abrams-spy-opera (or the nightmares of an NWO conspiracy junkie, cerebral cortex for a global brain, where Dick Cheney might manage Skynet.The curved wall’s 141 large, versatile screens, designed by Christie Digital, aren’t just for tracking global service and zeroing in on problems. They provide feedback from the world: local newscasts, the web, AT&T operators.But perhaps the most interesting bit of this giant telecom stethoscope: a live chart that monitors Twitter chatter for news of service outages, like the dream gadget of a social media strategizer. If you tweet about AT&T, and especially its service, someone at the command center will not only see it nearly instantly, they’ll geolocate it (assuming you have geolocation turned on) and respond to it, thanks to the company’s proprietary technology. The result is earlier detection of service problems—around 20 minutes earlier, on average, than a customer service call tends to provide.If all of this makes you want to dial up your local privacy advocate, take comfort in the promise by the center’s director that AT&T isn’t able to listen in on calls (they leave that kind of thing to the government). But that doesn’t minimize the slight creep factor of Tweet tracing in giant HD: the tech evokes fears of a surly regime (or, heck, any Western government) using that kind of analysis and other Big Brother data viz during times of unrest.
GNOC prides itself on making sure the network “performs flawlessly.” On an average business day, AT&T’s wires carry over 18 petabytes of data (picture a 12 mile stack of CDs), plus approximately 300 million wired and wireless calls. In March 2010, the network’s reliability performance rated between 99.9905 percent and 99.9999 percent. Notwithstanding that years-long spike on the Twitter screen about iPhones.
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