Severe Rain Revealed Unreliable Communications Facilities in California, CPUC Finds
Many communications outages may have been prevented during 2017 severe storms in California if wireline providers had more reliable cable facilities and wireless providers more widely used backup power, the California Public Utilities Commission reported. Staff analyzed carrier reporting data to examine causes of 911 call failures and network outages from January to February 2017, when California experienced the most rainfall in recorded history. Carriers said it was an unusually bad storm, and a former commissioner said companies must do better. Meanwhile, in the District of Columbia, the Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC) urged the Public Service Commission to reject Verizon’s dismissal of proposed rules for more detailed outage reporting.
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About one million California customers couldn’t call 911 during the storms, and more than 791,000 lost communications service and about 52,000 businesses had service interruptions, Monday's report said. More than 1.75 million wireline and wireless customers lost service. In January, carriers had five outages per day lasting four days on average; in February, there were 4.6 per day lasting 4.75 days on average. There were 288 wireline, wireless and DS3 major service outage reports. That includes 15 E-911 outages, 30 percent more than usual. Consumer complaints “were mostly attributed to wireline carriers,” with 83 percent for the state’s largest providers, AT&T and Frontier Communications.
The CPUC should meet with major providers to do network performance reviews and with poor performing wireless carriers to discuss service restoration processes, staff said. The agency should learn carriers’ network improvement plans in sparsely populated counties, review infrastructure program investments to assess service quality and network redundancy and find California’s most vulnerable locations by comparing major service outage data to other service quality data, it said. The agency should provide more public information on outages, too, it said. “Extreme weather events are becoming more commonplace,” the staff report said. “Service providers should be better prepared ... by developing redundant power capability.”
“Many states are in situations like California,” said Santa Clara University School of Law professor Catherine Sandoval in an interview. States have a mandate to ensure telecom carriers provide reliable service and, especially with climate change, “looking at the resiliency of their communication network is important for all states,” she said.
Carriers Respond
Wireline outages during the storms resulted from network equipment failures (59 percent) and power loss (41 percent); wireless outages stemmed from commercial power loss (39 percent), hardware failure (29 percent) cable issues (23 percent) and other problems (9 percent), including software, human error and environmental conditions. Wet cable failures contributed to many wireline outages, it said. “The service providers were also impacted by third party vendor hardware reliability and availability of readily available redundant hardware systems in restoring telephone services.”
Wireless networks weren't as resilient as landline networks for 911, with wireless outages affecting “significantly more” 911 facilities and customers than landline and VoIP providers combined in the two-month period, the report said. Hardware outages caused 67 percent of 911 outages, and cable outages 27 percent, it said. "Some 9-1-1 systems do not have sufficient redundant components in place to provide a backup.”
AT&T and Frontier said the two-month period was unusual and they responded to outages. “The record-setting 2017 storms led to state-of-emergency declarations in 55 California counties and impacted Frontier service areas over several months,” a Frontier spokesman emailed Tuesday. “Frontier pooled resources from other states and prioritized service restoration.”
“Given the historic rain we saw during the first part of 2017, we did see an above-normal load of wireline out of service tickets, so we brought techs in from around the country to address the added load,” an AT&T spokesman emailed. “Our techs worked 7 days a week through challenging conditions.” CTIA didn't comment.
Climate change is making severe weather more common in California, which alternates between drought and heavy rain, responded ex-CPUC Commissioner Sandoval. “That there are large storms doesn’t excuse” carriers from statutory reliability requirements, she said. “It’s always harder to come [from] behind than to do preventative maintenance.”
In D.C.
Verizon is incorrect to say more granular outage reporting won’t benefit its D.C. customers, the OPC said in Monday replies in RM27-2017-01. The PSC is weighing a proposed rule to require telecom providers reporting outages to identify “the most specific location of the service outage and the geographic area affected” that the provider has available for the initial report (see 1803190022).
"Providing specific location information for outages serves a major public interest by allowing the PSC and OPC to provide useful, detailed information about service disruptions to consumers,” OPC said. Verizon’s concerns about divulging proprietary information “are without merit given the protection currently available for genuinely-proprietary or otherwise confidential report data,” OPC said.
Public benefits don’t outweigh national security concerns of releasing more granular data, Verizon commented April 17. "Publicly disclosing specific locations and causes of outages and the affected customers provides very little benefit to those customers or the public." The PSC’s March revision to proposed rules "would still fail to deem the initial communications provided within an hour of an outage … as confidential," the carrier said. "The proposed rules would reveal proprietary information that is not only competitively sensitive, but also raise security concerns about the communications infrastructure in the Nation's Capital."