Resilience, Ingenuity and the Nysernet Network

 Sept. 11, 2026

A reflection on September 11, 25 years later

Shared by Nysernet President & CEO Jeanne Casares

As we mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, I want to share a piece of Nysernet history that many of our current members may not know. 

Our esteemed former president, Tim Lance, recently shared his recollections of Nysernet’s role in the aftermath of the attacks. What struck me most was not simply the technology involved, but the extraordinary resilience, creativity and determination of the people operating that network. 

At the time, Nysernet’s statewide network consisted of an OC-12 backbone with points of presence in New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. In New York City, we operated an OC-48 SONET ring.

On September 11, much of the 60 Hudson Street facility lost power. Nysernet’s equipment cage, however, remained powered, and both the statewide backbone and the SONET ring initially stayed up.

Then, at approximately 5 that evening, 7 World Trade Center collapsed. The collapse damaged the adjacent telephone company facility at 140 West Street, flooding its basements and taking the facility offline. This severed Nysernet’s SONET ring.

But the network had been designed with resilience in mind. The SONET ring self-healed, allowing the network and Nysernet’s equipment at 60 Hudson to remain operational, as did the statewide backbone.

In the days and weeks that followed, Nysernet’s networking team — including staff who remain part of our team today — found ways to use that infrastructure to help organizations that had lost their connectivity.

Our Nysernet team made programming changes that allowed a hospital, for example, to reach a node on the Nysernet SONET ring, travel across the network to 60 Hudson Street, cross the statewide backbone, and ultimately reach the outside internet through Buffalo.

In the middle of an unprecedented communications crisis, our networking team was not simply trying to keep Nysernet running. They were figuring out how to adapt the network to help others communicate.

There were other remarkable examples. Voice over IP was still largely experimental, yet engineers at Columbia established a bank of VoIP phones that connected to locations outside New York, allowing students to call their families and let them know they were safe.

What I find particularly powerful about Tim’s story is that it reminds us that Nysernet’s greatest strength has never been just the network itself. It has been the people behind it. During this chaotic and uncertain time, the expertise and steady hand of Nysernet’s dedicated board members were invaluable, as was the ingenuity of the technical teams who understood the network deeply enough to adapt it when circumstances changed. 

The technology we operate today is dramatically different from what existed in 2001. But the qualities that mattered then still matter now: technical expertise, ingenuity, collaboration, calm under pressure, and a willingness to figure out how to solve a problem when there isn’t an obvious answer.

That is part of the Nysernet legacy that we carry forward today.

And I think it is worth remembering that when we talk about the resilience of our network, we are really talking about the resilience of the people behind it.

As we mark this anniversary, I hope you’ll join me in taking a moment to remember those who lost their lives on September 11, those whose lives were forever changed and all those who responded in the days and weeks that followed.