Wireless carrier sources said Fri. concerns they expressed before...
Wireless carrier sources said Fri. concerns they expressed before a vote -- on when outage reports must be made and other issues -- weren’t addressed by the FCC, based on the order published by the Commission late Thurs. Carriers…
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have a meeting planned this week to discuss the order and future strategy. Senior carrier sources said a petition for reconsideration is likely. “It’s clearly not what we were asking for,” one source said. The source said the biggest concerns focused on 2 issues. First, wireless carriers are raising red flags about the short deadline for reporting an outage -- within 2 hours a carrier learns of it. Second, wireless carriers believe the standard for a reportable event -- an outage on an MSC of at least 30 min. duration that meets or exceeds 900,000 “user-minutes” -- is not realistic. “It may be good in a wireline context,” the source said: “It’s not a very good metric for wireless where… no one unit is ever assigned to one switch.” FCC said in the order that wireless switching is similar enough to wireline to justify the same standard. “The circuit switch part of a MSC is very similar if not identical to a wireline switch, and the MSC’s traffic management function is based on the same statistical methods,” FCC said. “Thus, the switch capacity of an MSC is a stable element on which to calculate the number of users potentially affected by an outage.”