Anyone who has ever seen footage of a hurricane’s aftermath is probably now familiar with the COW, or Cell on Wheels. These temporary cell sites stand in for towers and base stations knocked out by storms (and boost mobile capacity at the Super Bowl), but what happens if a severe storm, earthquake or terrorist attack takes down a far bigger chunk of the communications network?

This week AT&T’s(s t) National Disaster Recovery team gave me a sneak peek of an exercise in Chicago to prepare for the most severe outage scenario in its network short of its Global Network Operations Center in New Jersey going offline. The drill was designed to explore how AT&T would deal with a disaster that took out an entire metro central office.

Photo: AT&T

A central office may sound like an admin building, but in telco-speak it’s the term used for those huge windowless…