The FCC kicks off T-Mobile outage investigation by waiting to hear from you
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is putting his money where his mouth is, launching last week's promised investigation into one of the most spectacular US wireless network outages of the past few years. Evidently, T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray's explanation of the catastrophic June 15 issues and the solemn vow that the situation will not happen again haven't been enough to put Pai at ease.
While the technical aspect of the nationwide cellular blackout doesn't appear to be under scrutiny, at least for the time being, the Federal Communications Commission is interested in determining the exact scope of the outage and how much of an impact this actually had on everything from public safety entities to state and local governments, as well as enterprise, and of course, regular individual consumers.
In order to make as exhaustive a determination as possible, the Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is seeking comment from pretty much anyone interested in contributing to the investigation.
The aforementioned Bureau is quite specific and incredibly rigorous about the questions it wants answered, trying to find out among many other things the (estimated) number of failed or "otherwise affected" 911 calls on June 15, as well as whether or not public safety entities and state and local governments experienced disruptions of data services as a direct result of the outage.
Meanwhile, enterprise and individual consumers can help the FCC by sharing their experience in as much detail as possible, evaluating the effectiveness of T-Mobile's communication throughout that fateful day, as well as elaborating on the effect the outage had on both business and personal activities in terms of dropped calls, missed text messages, and data disruptions.
Even customers of other carriers than T-Mobile can lend a hand by telling the FCC if they were able to successfully complete calls to their friends or relatives on Magenta on the day in question. Whatever your position in this far-reaching matter, you have until July 8 to file your comments and detail your individual experiences and issues either online at this link here or by paper, in which case you'll need to send the Commission's Secretary, Office of the Secretary, Federal Communications Commission an original and one copy of each filing.
For now, it's obviously hard to anticipate if T-Mo will be punished in any way for a problem described as related to "a leased fiber circuit failure from a third party provider in the Southeast", and if so, what kind of sanction the "Un-carrier" might be facing. That probably all depends on how much noise you'll be making in these statements.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: