The Jeff Pulver Blog: FCC Efforts to Ensure Communications Lifelines for the Next "City in Exile"

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July 13, 2006

FCC Efforts to Ensure Communications Lifelines for the Next "City in Exile"

Tom Evslin, Jonathan Askin and I had great meetings at the FCC today. There was a lot of activity all day in the Commission Meeting Room because of the FCC's approval of the Adelphia merger, but we were at the FCC for entirely different reasons. I think most of the officials and staff with whom we met were rather surprised that we decline to talk about Internet communications. (I think Jonathan was pretty surprised too.) We were at the FCC to speak about the petition that we filed to ensure that refugees and exiles, displaced after a public disaster may have a communications lifeline. Every time Jonathan or an FCC staffer tried to move the conversation to a discussion of the proper regulatory framework for Internet communications, Tom and I steered the conversation back to post-disaster communications.

We had thought several months ago that our proposal was straightforward, easily and affordably implementable, and a proposal against which no one could logically argue. We were wrong, the Bell companies and the cable companies opposed our petition, although I still don't fully understand their rationale. We had simply proposed that, before the next hurricane or other public catastrophe, each provider that is obligated to provide E911 service to residential customers have a mechanism in place to ensure that its customers have voicemail service activated so that friends and family may be able to reach one another or at least inform friends and family of their safety and whereabouts. By our calculations, such a proposal would not have cost more than about one cent per customer. By Bell accounts, "the economics were not justified."

At a minimum, I think it is essential for the FCC, in the absence of a rule, use its power of persuasion to encourage all providers to offer such a free virtual voicemail service in the wake of the next public catastrophe.

We received great guidance from Chairman Martin's Office, from all of the other Commissioner Offices and from the Wireline Competition Bureau on how to build momentum and work to realize our objective of ensuring that no one is left without a communications lifeline during the next public crisis that brings down the communications networks. We intend to continue to work the process to try to have something simple and effective implemented before the next public catastrophe, before we experience the next "City in Exile."

Tags: Post-Disaster Communications, FCC, Tom EVslin, Jonathan Askin, Jeff Pulver

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