Lockheed Martin also now makes sure its WAN links go through two separate exchanges. "We have duplicate OC-3 lines out of here now," Stefancik says. "If one of our exchanges goes down, the other one may not flood. We take different paths, so they're not going through the same exchange box."

Others say multiple carriers or dual pathing wouldn't have made much difference in the storm's aftermath. "With Katrina, it wouldn't have mattered what carrier you were with -- everything was down," says Bret Jacobs, executive director of IT at Loyola University.

"Cell phones, local phone service, data, voice. Even the carriers lost power and ran out of diesel. Our Internet provider was forced to shut down and leave their building, because the building was commandeered. Plus every telephone pole was down, and every manhole and conduit underground was totally flooded. So there was no option really," he says.

The flooded conduits wreaked havoc on copper wiring, Jacobs says. He converted the T-1 link that fed the campus from copper to fiber. "We didn't get that until the end of the year," he says. And he is considering contracting with multiple ISPs in the future. "We are looking at it as an option," he adds.

No voice

Another major problem was that cell phone service was out, and land-line service was spotty at best, so people couldn't communicate with each other.

Stefancik, who also is chairman of the St. Tammany Parish council, says flooded towers knocked out cell service. "All cellular towers feed to a landline, and if the land exchange floods, you're wasting your time trying to work through a cell tower," he says.

His parish now requires cell towers to support larger fuel capacities, as well as the ability to switch to microwave communications in the event that the mobile carriers' land facilities go down. "Those are new requirements," he says.

Because most enterprises were forced to evacuate from New Orleans as Katrina approached, many who planned to communicate via cell phones found it difficult to reach their scattered employees. "You could not dial a 985, 228 or 504 area code and get through," Stefancik says.

Realizing the problem, many organizations bought cell phones from unaffected areas and distributed them to key employees. "We communicated primarily through e-mail, because the cell phones did not work," Loyola's Jacobs says. "Even my New Orleans cell phone in Houston didn't work in Houston. My telecom director evacuated to Tampa, and I had him acquire a case of cell phones with Houston numbers. He overnighted them to me in Houston, and I distributed those to the administration so we could continue to communicate."

Phelps Dunbar also bought new cell phones. "We outfitted the New Orleans crew that had relocated to Jackson [U.S. city 300 kilometers north of New Orleans] with some cell phones from a Jackson provider in that area code, and those worked," Rigamer says. "One of our partners just volunteered to go and get us a box of cell phones and get things going. It turned out to be very useful."

Lockheed Martin knew that cell phone and regular phone service would be questionable, so part of its successful disaster plan was to set up a series of conference calling stations at a sister site in Denver. Each employee was given a Denver phone number and a preset time to call before evacuating.

"So every day during the disaster, our execs call in at 3 p.m. and go through our processes and our status," Stefancik says. "That way, we can convey to people what needs to happen. Different departments have their own numbers, and they have people set up to call in at certain times. Everybody in this plant, wherever they relocate across the [United States], can also call into their number, and somebody will be on the line with them to give them some understanding of what's going on and provide direction for the future."

As a result of Katrina, many enterprises have made satellite phones a part of their future disaster-recovery plans. "We did not have satellite phones then, but we do now," Rigamer says. "That's a change we made -- just for a couple of key personnel in firm management."

Jacobs says Loyola kept about seven people on campus during the storm, and they had one satellite phone. "But we'll probably add a couple more satellite phones for them," he says, noting that such phones have their limitations. "You basically have to go outside and get a signal, so that could be a little dangerous during the height of the storm."