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FCC Won't Release Cell Carrier Reliability Data
imuffin writes "MSNBC is reporting that the FCC has been collecting data on the reliability of different cell phone carriers in the US. This data could be invaluable to consumers trying to choose a company to sign a lengthy contract with. Just the same, the FCC won't release the data to consumers, citing national security risks. The data collection on cell services began in 2004, but were simultaneously pulled from public view. FOIA requests to obtain the data have been denied, and commentators feel this is simply for the government's convenience." From the article: "'There is nothing mysterious behind it, it is corporate competition protection,' said [terrorism analyst Roger Cressey] ... 'The only reason for the government to not let these records get out is then one telco provider could run a full-page ad saying 'the government says we're more reliable.'' Cressey added that he couldn't imagine a scenario where the reports would be valuable to terrorists."
Just the same, the FCC won't release the data to consumers, citing national security risks.
Once again, confirming the fact that "national security risks" and "risks to corporate profit" are the same thing.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Cressey added that he couldn't imagine a scenario where the reports would be valuable to terrorists.
Except, say, if they're trying to pick a quality cell phone provider?
Money Talks.
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines...
it could be financial, technilogical prowess, who knows..
even if it 'were' terrorists, how else will they know which companies service to use for their remote triggers?
lastly. when WHATEVER entity commissioned the collection of data, started with a request for funds to collect the data.. the request must have detailed SOME benefit to justify (stop laughing, even though it's government, it's true) anyone have an idea of what the original justification was?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Why the hell did they do the study in the first place?
The reports at issue here concern the uptime of the cell phone providers' networks, not the rate of dropped calls or coverage problems.
FTA: Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract.
My solution is not to trust any of them. I had a contract with Cingular. Largest Network, Fewest dropped calls, blah blah. I don't buy it. Why should I trust Verizon not that it's claiming to have the largest network? If I get a prepaid phone, It'll be Cingular because most of the rest of my family is on Cingular, but I'm under no illusions that it will work more than 85% of the time away from large towns or cities.
So the Government uses my tax dollars to commision a report, and then denies me the information within that report?
This is information that I am paying for and could weigh heavily in my decision of which service to subscribe to. It is ridiculous that the government does not support a consumer-driven economy.
You know, I normally mod down grammar nazis. But I can't help but complain here. My article summary has been so heavily edited that I barely recognize it. When I submitted this story, it didn't have these subject/verb disagreements:
The data collection on cell services began in 2004, but were simultaneously pulled from public view.
or
FOIA requests to obtain the data has been denied,
And I certainly wouldn't use the questionable idiom "Just the same."
Come on, mods. If you're going to edit my submission beyond recognition and destroy its grammatical integrity while you're at it, at least don't attribute the submission to me.
And that is the threat! We must be prepared for threats we can't even imagine! The terrorists are cunning and we have to remove any information that could be used in any conceivable way by terrorists, even if we can't think of how they may use them!
I can't believe how careless cities are by providing traffic flow numbers and population densities. That kind of reckless pre-911 behavior will get us all killed!
Yet another incident wherein the public is not allowed to see/do/say/read/etc something because it would be a "national security risk". This is bullshit, obviously. They're using the Terrorism Scare (sort of a neo-Red Scare) to justify actions that would otherwise generate a lot of flack.
"We've been collecting information on cellphone services, and have produced a ranking of reliability. But, unfortunately, if we let Joe Sixpack have access to this information, the terrorists will win! So of course you realize that we're just keeping your best interests at heart, right? You wouldn't want the terrorists to blow up little Johnny's elementary school, now would you?"
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
FTA: Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract.
...
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This blatant over generalization is contradicted by
FTA: Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general's office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complainComplaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general's office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complain
People talk. They aren't just complaining to the authorities, either. As a result, everybody knows spotty service is an issue when they decide on *any* service provider. Caveat emptor is understood, so we move on to other decision factors. A much more significant factor is the family/friends connection. If the majority of the people I will be calling are on service X, I'm going with service X, even if service Y is more reliable, because service X will likely be lower cost.
I think this article is an attempt to enrage the masses because MSNBS is angry at being rejected by the FCC. It's a troll.
RTFA, and you will see that only really large outages are noted. This does not cover MUCH more common issues like:
* Poor RF optimization, leading to dropped calls and poor coverage
* Span outages to cell sites, forcing all calls on that site to drop and new attempts to be blocked
* Audio issues
AFAIK, while the feds may compile the data, I know of no efforts by any govt agency to independently collect this sort of data, IIRC it's all self-reported.
Now, if they lowered the thresholds (not gonna happen), then you would see more things of interest.
What are they really hiding?
The real issue that is being hidden here is the number of times paranoid homeland security dickheads takeout the cell networks in response to perceived local threats. This may be done with or without the carriers co-operation. However, the carriers know when it is happening.
Part of the problem is there's network, and then there's network. Just because you operate the most extensive network of any single cell phone company doesn't mean you have the biggest area where your customers can place non-roaming calls.
For example, I have a phone with T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a pretty small network; however, you can roam on a lot of other networks, particularly Cellular One in my area, at no additional charge over your normal plan. So the effective network is bigger than their actual company network.
Other cell phone providers have bigger networks themselves, but don't partner with anyone, so their effective network may be smaller.
paintball
When will people learn that terrorists may be using our roads, electrical grid, water supply, and grocery stores to benefit themselves? I hear some of them may even be using the telecommunications infrastructure to communicate with each other!
Once we deprive the terrorists of access to these resources, we can live safe and free. Limiting access to these things will be difficult as a practical matter, our best option is probably to blow all these things up.
We should probably burn down the schools and universities too -- there's no telling what a terrorist might do with knowledge they could gain there....
Your "risk to corporate profit" argument doesn't fly unless you're arguing that the Bush administration has some kind of stake in the least reliable carriers.
The FCC is an independent agency that answers to Congress, not the president. See USC Tile 47 151 and 154
What I think is more important than grammar mistakes is that your article summary was posted in the form of a direct quotation, with no indication that your words had been edited. That's extremely poor journalism. Quotation marks should always been reserved for direct word-for-word quotations... any changes by editors must be clearly indicated as such by the use of brackets. Or, the editors should paraphrase the summary instead of writing it in the form of a direct quote.
Not necessarily. What if I just moved into the area, and I don't have that many local friends? What if my friends are stupid, and I'd rather trust some sort of objective report? What if my friends are generally poor and don't have cell phones? What if my friends all work at the same place and their phones all come from a single provider, affording me no comparison? What if my friends all live far enough away that their cell outages aren't the same as mine? I can keep listing if you want me to, but the point is that in order to make an informed decision about something, we need information. Who are you to say what kind of information we should or shouldn't find more valuable?
Let's just say for a second that you 100% correct and that MSNBC is angry at being rejected their FOIA request by the FCC.
So? What difference does it make?
If MSNBC files a legitimate FOIA request (which they did), and the FCC rejects it for bogus reasons (which they did), it doesn't matter what MSNBC's motivations were or how they feel about it. It is wrong, and it needs to be fixed. Otherwise, we're setting the precedent of government denying FOIA requests for reasons that may have to do with more important things, like holding government accountable or protecting freedom.
I don't care if MSNBC wanted to use the report as toilet paper, it's publicly-funded non-national-security info that they have a right by law to get.
The FCC is an independent agency that answers to Congress, not the president.
Wow, thanks for the laugh, that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
FWIW, the commissioners are appointed by the President, and then confirmed by congresscritters. 3/2 split by political party.
Source? The FCC website The congressional oversight is a joke.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
>>> Cressey added that he couldn't imagine a scenario where the reports would be valuable to terrorists.
How about if the report highlights single points of failure that are a bit dicey already and could be targeted to wipe out the network causing untold damage to businesses.
It didn't exactly take much imagination to come up with that.
All it needs is a large explosion somewhere (not necessarily with any loss of life) added to a communication blackout and you've got pandemonium. Yeah I've heard of landlines, satellite phones and VoIP but these aren't what the majority will use to check up on their relatives and loved ones.
So how is knowing that carrier A drops 3% of calls and carrier B drops 5% of calls really going to make a fking difference to that scenario, brainiac ?
"OMG teh Al Kayeeda blew up the mobile tower, I can't call Mom and tell her to pick me up from soccer practice, let's start pandemonium!!!!1"
"pfft, don't panic, that tower drops 7% of calls anyway, n00bs"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If America doesn't convert the totally unaccountable "national security" excuse into a government system that's part of the oversight mechanism of checks and balances, then unaccountable government will destroy America. The national security excuse is therefore clear and present danger to real national security.
I note that "national security" is the excuse that Bush gives to protect his warrantless NSA spying on Americans, which covers the same telcos these reliability data could expose as unreliable with immunity, though they can use the data themselves for anything they want, including business competition.
Is there anyone left who believes Bush and his "national security" excuses are anything but fascism: government by and for, but not of, corporations? Anyone who believes anyone coming after Bush will be any more accountable, now that Bush has proven how easy it is for even a fool to abuse us this way, while we're actually under attack?
Why do they hate America?
--
make install -not war
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
My question is, how does the provider know in the case of mobile phones, how many were affected in a network outage?
They could go by billing address, which, on average might be reasonable assuming that residential and business areas are uniformly distributed but that's not the case. One could assume that a common contributing factor to outages is network congestion. So let's say a provider has an outage in a dense business dominated area where few of the customers have their bills sent to. This might, by the metric above, not trigger a report to the Network Outage Reporting System.
Another issue with this measure is how it would be weighted or manipulated. There are 4 large national generally distinct networks currently in existence: Verizon, Cingular/ATT, Sprint/Nextel, and T-Mobile. I've read in many places, though none truly authoritative, that T-Mobile has the smallest network among the national networks. If that's true, then it's possible they might have the fewest reportable outages. Most of the problems T-Mobile users experience would either be a function of lack of coverage of network congestion, neither of which seem to be reportable.
A different method which would come closer to answering the true question of the quality of a national cell service provider would involve randomly sampling different providers in different regions among different classes of customers (i.e. low, medium, and high volume customers as additional proxies for the variety of places an individual has traveled and to weight their view on network congestion).
Just my 2 cents or 3.46 cents if I melted them down at no cost and resold them
I know if I was going to use cellphones to detonate bombs, or communicate with others during a plot, I would definately like to know who the most reliable network belonged to.
I don't believe that the FCC has weighed the benefits of consumers being able to have Government collected data to aid them in making their decision when selecting a provider against the ills of terrorists having the same tool.
The data has been collected, that in itself is a security threat when the information is kept the out of the hands of the average American.
In such a situation, it is more likely for a specially trained terrorist informant to get ahold of the data than it is for a law abiding citizen.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
When you read article II you realize the president can't do shit without Congress's approval.
The mandate of the Commander in Chief, as we've seen lately, is rather broad. The U.S. Constitution is one of enumerated powers, but where the separation of powers is unclear, history has demonstrated that politics is the deciding factor. Whichever branch of the federal government jumps in first is likely to control, at least until they screw up. Witness our Fearless Leader. For years Congress didn't want to exercise its war powers, and was content to let the President exercise his. Now they're having second thoughts, and are beginning to give him less lattitude.
As for the FCC, although the FCC Chairmanship must be approved by Congress, it hasn't exactly been the kind of appointment the minority party is willing to fight over. When the majority party runs the House, the Senate, and the Congress, the President will get a rubber stamp on whomever he wants to run the FCC. Nobody likes fussing with FCC politics. It's messy, complex, and the electorate finds it boring. Better to spend political capital going after gay whales and people on respirators.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The idea that if the government releases the data, everyone will switch to the best provider is ridiculous. If everyone switches to the "best" provider, they'd become oversaturated, lots of service unavailable, and drop calls. They'd stop being the best. Then with the next report, everyone would switch to the new "best" provider. No, it doesn't work that way. Reporting will make all the companies more accountable and try harder to improve their service.
I would find out who is privy to the report and then track down who they use, chances are it's one of the ones at the top of the list we don't see. Well at least in their area I would suspect. But they may know how bad it really is and not even own a cell phone!
Clever or not, I got nothing...
I'm involved with contributing data to the reports in question. Let me point out that the accusation against the FCC isn't quite right. Submitter claims that the FCC has been collecting data on the "reliability" of different cell phone carriers in the US -- data that could be be invaluable to consumers. The data in question are actually "outage reports" that involve FCC reportable events. These types of events generally involve damage to systems and read like: "911 service down to 175,000 subscribers for 17 hours due to fiber burned in arson event at 777 Bozo St.", or "45,000 subscribers had no services in Deer Meadows when falling tree knocked over Hwy 32 repeater". They describe specific incidents and addresses with number of subscriber minutes affected.
Outage event reports full of acts of God (and acts of vandals) do not provide any data on the actual "reliability" of cell phone carriers as judged by consumers. Consumer reliability is seen as: "How often do my calls drop - how many areas of town have no service - how often do my call attempts say 'try again' or 'network busy'". Knowing that 20,000 users lost long distance service in BFE when an idiot with a backhoe dug up a fiber does not help with those questions -- oversubscribed cell phone towers are not reported as outage events. In short, the FCC does not know who the most "reliable" carriers are -- only which ones sustain the most damage to their facilities.
As for security matters: If anyone wanted to create havoc, they'd take one glance at the report and burn down the sites responsible for the largest outages listed. "National infrastructure" is described in painstaking detail. It wouldn't take a criminal mastermind - only a couple of drunk high school kids.