more on Why cell phone outage reports are secret

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Jon M. Peha" <[email protected]>
Date: December 17, 2006 7:43:50 AM JST
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IP] Why cell phone outage reports are secret

The FCC could release some aggregate data without all the details.
Concealing information about cell phone dependability is a more  
serious threat
to public safety and homeland security than releasing information.
I wrote the following after Hurricane Katrina for the Washington Post.

Jon Peha

Cellular Phones Failed Katrina Survivors; Congress Has a Solution
Washington Post, Sept 15, 2005

As Katrina survivors huddled on rooftops, trying desperately to call for
rescue or for medical assistance, many found that their cell phones  
had gone dead
when these phones were needed most.  (For example, see Washington Post,
"Communications Networks Fail Disaster Area Residents.")
One reason is that commercial cellular companies simply do not design  
their systems
to be highly reliable, especially under conditions like these.
This is not surprising.  Increasing reliability would
increase the costs of offering cellular service, without bringing in  
another dime
of revenue.  Nothing can completely prevent disasters from bringing  
systems down,
but should a cellular company have power back-up for
a two hour outage or a twenty hour outage?  At the moment, money spent
on the latter must come directly out of profits.

If directed by Congress,  the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)  
could easily
improve this situation.  There are consumers who would pay more for  
dependability,
but they have no way of knowing which carrier is more dependable.  Thus,
while carriers vigorously compete to be the least expensive option by  
cutting every corner,
these carriers cannot possibly compete to be the most dependable.
The FCC could produce annual report cards on the dependability and  
security of
cellular systems, and release these reports to the public in a form  
that makes sense to consumers.
Carriers who invest in reliability could then be rewarded with a good  
report card, and a
corresponding increase in demand for their service.



Jon M. Peha
Carnegie Mellon University
Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Wireless &  
Broadband Networking
www.ece.cmu.edu/~peha


David Farber wrote:
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <[email protected]>
> Date: December 16, 2006 12:54:47 PM JST
> To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <[email protected]>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why cell phone outage reports are secret
> Reply-To: [email protected]
>
> 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.”
>