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.
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.
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.