[IP] Why cell phone outage reports are secret
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 16, 2006 12:54:47 PM JST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why cell phone outage reports are secret
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Why cell phone outage reports are secret
Posted: Friday, December 15 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
<http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/12/why_cell_phone_.html#posts>
Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be
when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal
Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won't.
The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone
provider outages that it has maintained since 2004.
A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in
August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated
reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan
attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies
involved.
Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of
consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general’s office, for example,
last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common
complaint, trailing only gas prices, credit card firms and home
improvement scams.
To find out if a cell phone carrier service will be reliable,
consumers are forced to buy a phone, then use it at home and on their
normal commuting routes. Callers generally get 30 days at most to
return a phone if the service doesn’t work well enough.
But that test won’t reveal anything about carriers’ periodic outages.
The Federal Communications Commission does know something about
outages, however. It has collected outage reports from
telecommunications firms since the early 1990s. Any time a carrier
has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes – say a 30-minute
outage impacting 30,000 customers – it must report it to the Network
Outage Reporting System.
In the beginning, the reports all were from “wire line” telephone
providers and were available to the public. But in 2004, the
commission ordered wireless firms to supply outage reports as well.
But at the same time, it removed all outage reports from public view
and exempted them from the Freedom of Information Act.
The FCC took the action at the urging of the Department of Homeland
Security, which argued that publication of the reports would
“jeopardize our security efforts.”
[snip]
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