WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission will establish a year 2000 “war room” that will be manned from Dec. 30 through the first part of January, depending on what happens when the year, century and millennium switches from 1900 to 2000, the FCC told RCR last week.
This war room will have contact information for all of the major telecommunications carriers and will interface with a center set up by the White House and the national media.
The FCC war room also will interact with the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, which has been preparing for the Y2K rollover. NRIC is an FCC advisory committee chartered to examine network outages and network interoperability issues. Created in 1992, its main function in 1998 and 1999 has been to prepare for anticipated year-2000 problems.
Carriers should not expect to interface with the FCC Y2K war room unless there is a specific problem. Carriers will have “limited interaction [with the FCC] unless there is a problem,” said Gerald P. Vaughan, deputy bureau chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Should a carrier believe it has a Y2K problem, the company should fix the problem, not contact the FCC for direction. “We are in a reactionary mode. We have done all of proactive [planning] we can do,” Vaughan said.
The Personal Communications Industry Association agreed. The FCC’s war room will “not be a two-way information flow,” said Mary McDermott, PCIA senior vice president and chief of staff for government relations, so carriers need to know the best way to contact their vendors. “The key thing [carriers] are going to need to do is to contact their vendors,” McDermott said.
