WASHINGTON-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has signaled concerns to the industry about potential disruptions to public telecommunications networks as a result of the Internet’s growing popularity.
The FCC said Ivan Seidenberg, chairman of Nynex Corp. and head of the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council-a congressionally sanctioned federal advisory group comprised of industry executives and consumer advocates-supports a continuing examination of the Internet’s affect, if any, on public telecom networks.
“Questions that have been raised about the impact of Internet usage underscore the importance of this council and its work,” said Hundt. “It is vital for the public to know that when questions like this are raised, there is a place to go for answers.”
Seidenberg asked the council’s monitoring unit to report back on whether any corrective measures should be taken. It is not clear when the council plans to report its findings to Hundt.
The monitoring committee recently reported that no carrier has encountered problems from the Internet based on the outage threshold of 30,000 customers or more being without service for over a half hour.
The FCC noted, though, that while the council says Internet use does not pose “any unusual network outage hazards … rapid Internet growth does represent a capacity management challenge often requiring rapid and costly equipment augmentation.”
For that reason, the council agreed to keep an eye on the Internet-network interrelationship.
While most Internet transmissions occur over wire and optical fiber, the potential impact on wireless telecommunications could be indirect initially and possibly more direct in the future.
Even with expanded channel capacity through cell sectorization and digitization, most wireless calls are routed through wireline networks to be terminated.
As new personal communications services join cellular and enhanced specialized mobile radio carriers and as subscribers for those services grow, wireless Internet and data traffic is expected to grow as well. Whether wireless Internet and other data applications will ever threaten wireless network reliability is another question. New carriers, scrapping for subscribers to occupy broad chunks of new spectrum, should be so lucky.
The council advises the FCC on how to improve operation and inter-connectivity of the nation’s telecom networks and includes high-ranking executives from telecom service providers, equipment manufacturers, standards-setting organizations and consumer interest groups.
