WASHINGTON-The telecommunications industry forum studying whether the telephone network
will work when the new century arrives needs better participation from the wireless industry, said Peter Spring 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. Spring works for AT&T Corp.
AT&T’s CEO C. Michael Armstrong chairs the committee.
The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association
is leading the effort to test wireless networks and their interoperability with the wireline network. Arthur Prest, CTIA
vice president for science and technology, reports wireless-to-wireless testing was completed Jan. 12. “We saw
no problems. It went off without a hitch.”
The Personal Communications Industry Association is working to
get the word out to small carriers, said Mary McDermott, PCIA senior vice president and chief of staff for government
relations. PCIA is holding a Y2K forum on Jan. 26.
The two associations are using different tactics so they don’t
duplicate efforts, McDermott said.
The millennium bug results from a computer programming decision made
decades ago to make year-date fields only two digits and program computers to assume the first two digits were
“19.” It is feared at the start of 2000, computers will crash or work improperly because they will think it is
1900 instead of 2000.
The lack of wireless carrier participation may come from a perception that NRIC is a wireline
organization. The Y2K problem is the first time there has been a potential need to study wireless/wireline
interoperability, McDermott commented. “Historically and culturally, the wireless guys haven’t participated
because they didn’t have anything to do with them.”
There are no wireless participants in the focus group
assessing where the United States-and the world-is in preparing for the 21st Century, said Gerry Roth of GTE Corp.
When Roth made his NRIC presentation last week, he did not have any data from the wireless industry. He hopes to
have this data by the next NRIC meeting, scheduled for April. He cautioned, however, that “the lack of
information, in and of itself does not mean a lack of progress.”
CTIA is collecting the data requested by
NRIC, Prest said.
There is good news for the wireless industry, said Bill Blatt of Nortel Networks. Wireless
handsets and paging devices, known as customer premises equipment, will work, Blatt said.
The
telecommunications industry has asked the FCC to issue a regulation moratorium during the time of the rollover so
companies can focus on Y2K issues. This was met with skepticism from FCC Commissioner Michael Powell, who
attended the meeting. “This is not an opportunity to avoid regulatory obligation under the name of Y2K,”
he said.
