I was in Washington DC yesterday (January 14) and had a choice. I had some free time and could either spend the afternoon at the Senate watching the trial, or I could go over to the FCC and watch the NRIC meeting. I choose the NRIC meeting. The Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, chaired by Bill Armstrong chairman of AT&T, moved along pretty quickly. Most of the focus was on Year 2000 issues telco issues. No great surprises, like most industries, most reports were positive were positive about the industry. Most telephone companies in the USA are on track to completing their Year 2000 project on time, and there are no PSTN to CPE year 2000 problems. Most of the problems were called "second-order" affects. For example, your T1 line and demarc have no Year 2000 issues, but your router or super-smart CSU/DSU might have some. POTS (plain old telephone service) seemed most unaffected. In other words a plain voice line with no options, and a Western Union 2500 telephone set. Its when you get into POTS+ services issues show up. The phone line works, but a fax machine may print the wrong date at the top of the fax page. 9-1-1 calls will go through, but some secondary PSAP equipment (e.g. GIS map systems, dispatching, voice recorder timestamping, etc) might have a year 2000 issue. A repeated theme of the meeting was the second-order problems were the customer's responsibility, and the customer needed to take action to fix them not the phone company. Things were pretty much focused on traditional wireline carriers. Very little was said about wireless, and there was no representation from new things such as the Internet or ISPs. Bill Armstrong reported he as sent two letters out, but received essentially no response. I'm not sure who Mr. Armstrong sent the letters to. I know I haven't ever received one. But I'm was amused to hear I'm not the only one who has trouble getting information out of ISPs :-) I'm not sure how many people on the Council realized it, but it was interesting to watch the Internet being transformed from a convenience to a critical component. Although neither the NRIC nor the FCC seem to know how to communicate with the ISPs, an amazing amount of information and contingency plans are primarily being distributed via the web. But there seems to be no contingency plan for keeping, or restoring the web operation. The contingency plans that do exist, currently exclude Internet service providers unless they happen to be part of a traditional wireline facility based provider. But even then, I've noticed the ISP NOC and the wireline NOC's at the same provider have no contingency plan for communicating with each other. I know, you've heard me beat that drum before. The final part of the meeting was the 1998 annual report from the Network Reliability Steering Committee. The full report is on the ATIS site, but a few highlights. You should read at least the last page on the AT&T frame-relay outage. The frame-relay part of the outage was only important in it caused congestion on the switched network when all the remote sites dialed up their backup lines at the same time. This year NRSC did a root cause analysis across all their outages and found "Procedural Errors" were the top root cause of 32% of all outages. DACS problems are continuing to increase, with 1998 being the highest year yet. Facility failures and CO power problems were continuing areas of concern. The NRIC committee asked the NRSC to track if the National One-Call legislation passed last year had any affect on the number of cable dig-ups. The NRIC web site is <http://www.nric.org/>. A number of reports and presentations are online. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation