WASHINGTON-The two trade associations representing the wireless industry last week joined other trade associations and the federal government in a major advertising campaign asking, “Are You Y2K OK?” The campaign’s objective is to reach small- and medium-sized companies that may not be as diligent as larger companies in preparing for the year 2000 and the onset of the millennium bug.
The millennium bug results from a computer programming decision made decades ago to make the year-date field only two digits and program the computer to assume the first two digits were “19.” It is feared that at the start of 2000 computers will crash or work improperly because the computer will think it is the year 1900 instead of 2000.
The problem could be catastrophic because computers are not only large mainframes; other items, like elevators, also have computer chips. President Clinton has said the average home has more computing power today than the entire campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did 20 years ago.
Clinton began a national effort to combat the millennium bug earlier this year by appointing the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion. One of the major achievements of the council was the enactment of legislation that allows companies to share information. It is hoped companies now will start broadcasting what has worked and what has not worked in trying to cure the millennium bug.
“This legislation will be a sea change,” said John Koskinen, chair of the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion.
The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and the Personal Communications Industry Association both were listed as sponsoring organizations in the “Are You Y2K OK?” campaign.
Both groups also were present at a recent meeting of the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council. NRIC is a Federal Communications Commission advisory committee chartered to examine network outages and network interoperability issues. It was created in 1992 as the Network Reliability Council, and the interoperability function was added in 1996. At the meeting, the NRIC’s charter was amended to place an emphasis on Y2K interoperability.
NRIC is being chaired by AT&T Corp. Chief Executive Officer Michael Armstrong. Its charter will expire Jan. 6, 2000-less than a week after the new millennium arrives. The final meeting of NRIC therefore will be an evaluation meeting, said AT&T’s John Pasqua, who spoke at the NRIC meeting. Pasqua also outlined a schedule of meetings where on-going assessments and testing will be discussed. For example, the telecommunications industry, through two focus groups, will report back to the FCC through NRIC in January, April, July and October on the status of Y2K testing.
Contingency planning will be discussed at the Oct. 14, 1999, meeting if the telecom network or portions of it are not ready for the new millennium.
Other FCC Y2K activities
In addition to gaining information from NRIC, the FCC also has formed focus groups to garner Y2K readiness information and asked for comment on Y2K issues in a notice of proposed rule making on public safety released last month.
Eddie Gleason, PCIA government relations manager for paging, said he reported to the FCC that the paging industry had been working on the Y2K problem since 1996. Since that time, the paging industry has had three types of concerns: infrastructure compliance, individual product compliance and customer billing and records. Testing has been completed on the infrastructure and products, and results have been posted on the manufacturers’ Web sites, Gleason said. There still are problems with the customer billing and records, but carriers are working persistently to fix them before Jan. 1, 2000, he added.
Any additional problems the paging industry may face will be more of a nuisance, Gleason said. “With this week being Y2K Action Week and the amount of press it is receiving, there is less of a likelihood that a major outage will occur,” he said last week.
Many in the public-safety community were surprised to see the FCC’s focus on the millennium bug appear in the recently released NPRM. When the item was adopted in August, the official FCC news release did not mention Y2K. The request for comments apparently was a direct result of a public forum held in June to assess whether the public-safety community was Y2K ready. Most of the participants at the forum said at that time many public-safety agencies have yet to focus on the millennium bug, and the ones that have, have met with resistance from local government officials.
Apparently to highlight the urgency of the Y2K problem, the FCC included the issue in the public-safety NPRM dedicated mostly to service rules for a new spectrum allocation derived from television channels 60-69. These channels are to be returned as part of the conversion to digital TV.
“As a regulatory agency, the FCC is in a bit of a difficult position in fixing the Y2K problem. The FCC does not have operational duties. The best way [to address the millennium bug issue] is to put out an NPRM,” said John F. Clark, deputy chief for public safety of the public-safety and private wireless division of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Through a spokesman, FCC Commissioner Michael Powell said he was looking forward to the comments on the public-safety community’s Y2K readiness. “I am very pleased that we are using the public-safety item to increase our efforts to alert the public-safety communications community to the nature and seriousness of the Year 2000 problem and to ascertain both the current state of Y2K readiness and the progress and range of compliance initiatives in that community.”
Powell is the FCC’s representative on the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion and the point person on Y2K readiness for the telecommunications sector. When NRIC finishes its work, it will report to Powell.
