[EAS] Lacking Common Sense...

[Adrienne Abbott]

Did anyone else see this? Why does the FCC need to have a Congressional
hearing to figure out that cells phone and the Internet don't work when
there's no power?

FCC examining storm damage to area phone networks after 911 calls failed

By Brendan Sasso - 07/03/12 01:29 PM ET

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking into the damage that
the massive storm that swept from the Midwest into the Northeast on Friday
caused to wireless and landline phone networks in the mid-Atlantic. 

As of Monday morning, 16 percent of cell towers in West Virginia were still
disabled. Nearly 11 percent of Maryland's towers were down, as well as 9
percent in Virginia and 3 percent in Washington, D.C., according to the FCC.

Widespread power outages also caused problems for many 911 call centers in
the region.

Lauren Kravetz, a spokeswoman for the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland
Security Bureau, said the commission is still investigating the problems
with emergency calls, but that 911 operators might have been unable to
identify a caller's number and location. She said it is unclear how many
people were unable to make an emergency call at all.

According to The Washington Post,
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-storm-911-phone-service-remains-s
potty/2012/07/02/gJQA33dHJW_story.html> many 911 callers in the region heard
either silence, busy signals or recorded messages saying the line was
inoperative.

"We plan to meet with a number of carriers in the coming weeks to explore
the cause of service issues to 911 service centers, overall lessons learned,
and other issues to ensure that the public received the best communications
service possible and is able to communicate effectively and in a way that
safeguards public safety in these situations," David Turetsky, chief of the
FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said in an emailed
statement.

Gordon Smith, CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, sent a letter
to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Tuesday, arguing that the damage to
phone networks demonstrates the importance of local broadcasters.

"This weather emergency again highlights the fact that broadcasters'
'one-to-everyone' transmission architecture delivers a robust and reliable
signal to hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously, with little or no
risk of a service disruption," Smith wrote.

The storms also reportedly
<http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/29/amazon-outage-netflix-instagram-pinterest
/> disrupted a major Amazon data center in Ashburn, Va. The outages took
down Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram, which rely on Amazon's cloud
computing services. 

No government services were disrupted by the Amazon outage, but the incident
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fridays-storms-raise-
questions-about-safety-of-cloud-computing/2012/07/02/gJQAP06HJW_story.html>
prompted Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) to move ahead with a hearing to
examine the benefits and dangers of cloud computing.

"Last week's powerful thunderstorms, along with the massive disruptions they
caused, exposed some of the vulnerabilities of cloud computing," said Bono
Mack, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Commerce,
Manufacturing and Trade. She said the panel will also examine privacy and
data security issues related to cloud computing.

Bono Mack's hearing could come later this month or sometime in the fall.

 

Adrienne Abbott

Nevada EAS Chair

"Radio burps, it cries, it needs to be fed all the time, it requires
constant attention, but we love it." Jim Aaron WGLN