WIRELESS INDUSTRY OPPOSES FCC REPORTING RULES

“The FCC seems to be interested in collecting far more data than they should need,” said one wireless industry source. “They're trying to get at service quality. Why else would they need the level of information they're asking for?” But the source noted that key staffers and members of the Commission seem intent on issuing reporting requirements: “Anything under the guise of homeland security is sacrosanct.”

A 2nd carrier source noted the process is still in its early stages. While the Commission unanimously approved mandatory reporting in the proposed rulemaking “there’s a ways to go,” the source said: “We're trying to communicate to them you'd get better reporting with a voluntary approach.”

The reporting requirements could actually make systems less secure, CTIA warned the FCC. “CTIA believes that extending the outage reporting requirements as proposed could negatively impact Homeland Security,” the carrier group said: “CTIA submits that the [rulemaking] risks providing a roadmap for bad actors seeking to disable critical components of our information infrastructure by making detailed information on communications network vulnerabilities available to the public.”

CTIA urged voluntary compliance. “CTIA believes that voluntary reporting will provide for the collection of timely, beneficial data concerning service interruptions from the wireless industry, without the need for cumbersome regulatory oversight,” the group said: “Additionally, the voluntary Industry Led Outage Reporting Initiative (ILORI) process provides an incentive for carriers to report outages/infrastructure problems in a constructive, problem- solving manner, something that will not result from an FCC mandated process.”

T-Mobile said the proposed requirements don’t take into account the changing nature of the industry. “The proposal fails to consider the revolutionary changes that have occurred in the telecom industry since the wire-line mandatory outage rules were adopted 12 years ago,” the company said: “T-Mobile suggests it is not appropriate to extend to competitive sectors rules adopted for a monopoly environment. Wireless carriers operating in a fiercely competitive market have powerful economic incentives to operate reliable networks so as to acquire and keep customers, even without regulation.”

Cingular agreed the industry is fixing problems independent of FCC mandates. “The events which led the Commission to adopt the wireline outage reporting requirements in the early 1990s are not present in today’s wireless marketplace,” the carrier said: “When it adopted the wireline outage reporting regime, the Commission was faced with a recent history of devastating network outages, no voluntary industry sharing of outage data and no development of best practices.” Bells Concerned New Rules Could Impose Financial, Other Burdens

The Bell companies expressed concern that additional outage reporting requirements proposed by the FCC (CD Feb 13 p7) could impose undue financial and administrative burdens on service providers and expose critical infrastructure information to misuse. They argued the costs of such requirements would outweigh benefits. They urged the Commission to work closely with the industry to revise its proposals into workable solutions that would meet the Commission’s needs without overburdening the industry.

BellSouth and Qwest said the current outage reporting requirements were working and the Commission’s concerns could be addressed with minor changes. Calling many of the FCC proposals “overly complex, unduly burdensome and in some cases impractical or technically infeasible,” BellSouth said the FCC hadn’t demonstrated that the existing reporting obligations for wireline carriers were ineffective. It said rather than imposing “additional obligations on wireline carriers,” the Commission should “simplify the reporting process and promote faster service restoration.”

The Bells expressed concern that the new requirements would dramatically increase the number of reports they would have to file with the Commission, raising industry costs. Verizon estimated the proposal would expand the number of reportable outages to 500 or more, from the present 19-25 per year, for Verizon alone. BellSouth said the proposed rules would mean the number of outage reports it filed annually could jump by more than 1,000% to more than 20 per month, without any change in network performance. USTA estimated many medium-size members would experience at least a 30% increase in reporting under the proposed rules. “Of course, the higher volume of reports would impose additional man-hour costs upon providers,” BellSouth said. Verizon said such “expansion” would also “swamp the Commission with reports of minor outages and would not give the Commission a better picture of network reliability.”

The Bells also said the Commission shouldn’t make the rapid reporting requirements a priority over restoring the services by carriers in case of an outage. “The Commission must keep in mind the fact that the people who must develop the information needed to report outages to the Commission often are the same ones who are responsible for restoring service once an outage has occurred,” Verizon said. It said reporting requirements that would require carriers to “divert resources away from responding to an outage -- such as the [FCC’s] proposed requirement that all outages be reported within 120 minutes -- likely would have the unintended effect of delaying restoration of service.”

Industry best practices should continue to be voluntary, Verizon said. It said mandating best practices would “likely have the unintended consequences of slowing industry innovation and would impose an expensive one-size-fits-all solution that would not be appropriate for all areas of recommended practices.” USTA said the development of best practices had been “the result of voluntary participation in the process, and creation and implementation of new best practices will continue without increased regulation.”

The Bells also expressed concern that the Commission’s proposed rules wouldn’t protect from public disclosure the information provided in outage reports. “Outage reports may contain highly sensitive, critical infrastructure information,” SBC said: “If that information falls into the wrong hands, it could be used as a basis for attacking our nation’s communications infrastructure.” SBC urged the FCC to develop a secure database, created and maintained by an unbiased 3rd party and restricted from public access. Verizon said the proposed reporting procedures should be revised to ensure security, allow withdrawal of reports filed in error, and minimize the frequency of substantive changes to the reporting template. Qwest said the Commission should change its proposed electronic filing requirement to ensure that “essential functionality is provided and that all disruption reports are confidential.” USTA backed “stringent protections” for sensitive information on service disruptions.

The Bells also offered alternative standards and mechanisms for outage reporting that they said would strengthen the FCC’s ability to monitor network reliability and minimize disruption for the industry. For example, Verizon recommended the Commission adopting requirements, such as these: (1) The FCC should be notified within 120 min. that an outage occurred, with the initial report due 72 hours and the final report 30 days later, and only the final report attested. (2) The number of affected users should be measured based on lines in service, not an estimate of the number of individuals affected. (3) “Outage” should be defined as a complete loss of communications over a line, not a “significant degradation” of service. (4) An outage should be reported if it causes a loss of service for at least 30 min. to all end users served by a host switch or a host remote cluster and if it results in at least 90,000 blocked calls, using real time measurement, or would have blocked at least 30,000 calls based on historical use of the switch.

Verizon said a 911 outage should be reported if at least 30,000 users have no 911 service for at least 30 min., or, if fewer than 30,000 users are served by the affected switch, their 911 service is disrupted more than 6 hours. The FCC had proposed to require carriers to file an outage report every time a single customer was out of 911 service 30 min. Qwest said the proposal went “too far in eliminating any threshold for triggering a 911 special facility reporting obligation.” At the very least, it said, the proposed new rule should clarify that “there is no reportable outage unless a 911 special facility is impacted.” It said the rule should also be modified to eliminate reporting obligations where “an impacted facility has lost ALI-ANI capability but not basic 911 service.”

Verizon said in the case of tandem offices, an outage should be reported if it results in at least 90,000 blocked calls, using real time measurement, or would have blocked at least 30,000 calls based on historical use of the tandem switch. It also said the number of airports considered “special facilities” for reporting purposes could be increased from 69 “major airports” to the 136 primary hub airports serving more than 96% of passengers, but it shouldn’t be extended to 2,000 passenger airports potentially covered by the FCC proposal. Qwest said the proposal to expand the definition of airports to include all of them was “overbroad.” It said rather the FCC should require reports for disruptions affecting the top prime hub airports as defined by the Federal Aviation Administration. USTA said the reporting of outages that affect special services was “especially unrealistic because resources the required to report special services outages are enormous.” Satellite Operators Question Details of Proposed Requirements

Satellite operators generally supported the idea of reporting, but opposed specifics of the proposed rules based on their services. The Commission proposed to require satellite communications providers providing telephony or paging services to report network losses of 30 minutes or more, or loss of satellite links or associated terrestrial components when 900,000 user minutes are affected. SES Americom and PanAmSat said operators can easily determine satellite or transponder outages. But “the space station licensee is in no position to determine whether or not the 900,000 ‘user-minutes’ threshold proposed by the FCC will be exceeded during a particular satellite or transponder outage,” they said. Operators often don’t know what services their capacity is used to provide, SES and PanAmSat said. They also wouldn’t know how many users are affected or whether degradation in the transponder or satellite performance would cause a service loss. The companies said the reporting requirement should reflect those realities and require only reports on outages of 30 minutes or longer that manifest themselves “as a loss of complete accessibility to at least one satellite or transponder.” Telesat’s comments highlighted similar issues, but came to a different conclusion: “In Telesat’s view, that reporting requirement would most appropriately fall upon the carrier or service provider dealing directly with the end-user customers of these services. Only that service provider will be in a position to provide the Commission with the information required to determine the root cause and full extent of the service outage in the timeframes contemplated in [the] NPRM.” Separately, Intelsat agreed.

The FSS companies also objected the 2-hour time limits the FCC proposed, and said all of the information requested may not be available by the deadline. “Because in-orbit space stations are not physically accessible, discovering the root cause of a satellite or transponder malfunction can take weeks or months. The Commission should clarify that the filing of a report that provides the currently available information regarding an outage complies with Commission requirements even if no response is given to some items on the Commission’s forms,” said SES and PanAmSat. Intelsat proposed requiring an initial outage report by mid-day the day after an outage.

Reports for outages of 30 minutes or more shouldn’t be applied to mobile satellite service (MSS) providers, MSS operators said. Different system designs and in-orbit spares provide redundancy, Globalstar said, so “the loss of access to one satellite may at times lower the quality of service available to users, but it would not cause a service outage.” The same principle would apply to a gateway antenna subsystem outage, Globalstar said. Reporting requirements shouldn’t be based on the time of the outage, but whether the outage affects service to the users, Globalstar said. Iridium agreed, and said it didn’t oppose the proposed common metric of reporting outages over a 900,000 user-minute threshold. But the company said MSS operators don’t know how many users are in an area at once, making the metric difficult to apply: “[T]he proposed metric should be clarified for LEO satellites so that it is clear that [it] only applies when the same group of users affected experience the same outage continuously for the same period of time.”

SES, PanAmSat, Globalstar and Iridium opposed publicizing the outage reports. Globalstar said publicizing the reports could make network “vulnerabilities” available to terrorists. SES and PanAmSat expressed concern that commercially sensitive information would be revealed. Iridium said the Commission shouldn’t require electronic filing of the reports. SES, PanAmSat and Iridium said the information should be collected concerning outages affecting U.S. users only. Iridium said reports should be collected voluntarily, but the Commission should open another comment proceeding on how to assure voluntary reporting of outages.