The timetable was to finish the upgrades in Portland this week. The upgrades are being done in phases. Conversion will likely be done on the weekend of July 10. There will be three weeks between the Portland cut and the next cut in Eugene, and four weeks between Eugene and Salem. December-January Plans We will be monitoring the systems and assuring backups of the systems before the end of the year.
Power is the biggest concern, fortunately all of the systems have some kind of backup.
Saturday and Sunday will include regression tests to be sure system is up and running. Ron Trullinger US West s goal is to make sure telecommunications work the same after midnight as it did before midnight and if there were any problems they would be transparent to the custormers. The network is the basic public switch network and other specific networks like the Frame Relay Data and wireless networks. Components of the network typically do not rely on date related information to process voice and data communications, therefore US West expects to encounter very few system reliability problems. They have set up test labs throughout the United States to test any type of equipment.