Why cell phone outage reports are secret

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: December 16, 2006 12:54:47 PM JST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why cell phone outage reports are secret
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

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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