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September 05, 2005
Labor Days at the FCC:
I've got to hand it to the FCC. The Commission rose to the occasion this Labor Day Weekend. The FCC released a series of orders over the weekend designed to ensure communications service in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Today the FCC acted to facilitate continuing service for customers of wireline carriers who are unable to provide service due to Hurricane Katrina. The Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau has adopted an order that temporarily waives certain carrier change requirements. This action will allow affected carriers to temporarily transfer customers to those carriers with working facilities while restoration efforts are under way. Yesterday, the FCC acted to allow telephone customers in Katrina-affected areas to Reinstate Disconnected Telephone Numbers.
I would like to have seen the FCC specifically acknowledge how IP technology could ease the plight of Gulf State residents and to develop a process going forward that would protect against prolonged communications outages. I have received many communications from many members of the IP-based communications community who are ready and willing to contribute services and know-how to make up for the loss of traditional telephone access. I suggested last year that BellSouth, specifically, deploy a "soft-line" product that would provide each consumer a second line, via IP, that would allow the user to obtain a nomadic VoIP service, reachable form any Internet connection, in addition to the users fixed, primary PSTN line. Such a soft-line certainly could have come in handy to ensure continued communications with friends, family, colleagues and emergency responders during this time of crises when traditional landlines went down in the Hurricane or when users are uprooted from their homes. I don't think it matters much who deploys the services - BellSouth, other LECs, cable companies, or unaffiliated VoIP providers -- but going forward, it would be great to know that there is a process in place that would ensure continued communications even when phone service goes out due to disaster. In the current situation, it would be great if numbers could be readily, if only temporarily, ported to IP-based communications service providers, so that users could be reached, or at least be able to pick up voicemail, via Web-accessible accounts.
Frankly, it seems that many members of the IP-based communications industry want to help but don't quite know how to help. Congressman Pickering and his staff were particularly successful in trying to harness the industry to aid in revitalizing communications, but most help could only come in the form of sending equipment not services (which is primarily all the IP-based communications industry could offer). Going forward, I think we need the IP-based communication industry's equivalent of the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) and for our industry to work together as a whole during a crisis and by doing so, help serve the community of affected parties - and be there immediately at a time we can be the most effective.
We need to make clear that we are not taking advantage of anyone's disadvantage. In times of public crisis, we have to be there to serve the distressed and to provide an alternative communications architecture that can work and provide "peace of mind" when the traditional means of communications have otherwise failed.
Posted by jeff on September 5, 2005 09:35 PM | Permalink
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