Public Safety Mulls Spectrum Shift, VoIP Petition

Telecom Policy Report, March 20, 2006

Their 18-page petition for rulemaking on "preserving post-disaster communications" maintains adversely impacted users should either be able to quickly activate voicemail services that can be accessed by incoming callers or be allowed to expedite local number porting to alternate service providers, including to numbers outside of the affected geographic areas.

In suggesting this variety of new measures, Pulver and Evslin also reason that incumbent carriers could be required to provide the basic emergency service of temporary voicemail and/or call-forwarding in the same way they are required to provide E911.

The petition also supports the FCC's special Hurricane Katrina independent panel currently reviewing that disaster's communications challenges as well as the creation of the new Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. However, it maintains that the commission and service providers may be inadequately prepared for a future emergency by waiting for formal recommendations from either the panel or the new bureau. "There is not time before the next hurricane season to wait for ponderous studies of the whole Katrina fiasco," Pulver and Evslin wrote.

The petition also suggests that extraordinary measures should kick in when there are "long-term telephone outages." It asks the FCC to define "long term" as any situation in which an actual outage has occurred for more than 12 hours "for any reason" or where an evacuation order has been issued for a particular geographic area (as in the case of an impending or ongoing natural disaster or other emergency).

Pulver and Evslin have claimed their petition isn't intended to promote IP-based communications or to accelerate VoIP usage, although the filing stresses that in natural disasters and other emergencies, including terrorism, the FCC could have procedures in place to promote access to multiple technologies as a preparatory move. Satellite communications also has been mentioned in several quarters as an alternative.

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