OTHER NEWS - Feb. 14, 1992

Phone Outages Must Be Reported, FCC Rules: Phone companies must immediately report service outages that affect more than 50,000 customers for at least 30 minutes, the Federal Communications Commission ruled. The ruling, which doesn’t affect satellite or cellular phone systems, follows congressional criticism that the FCC was too lax in its response to major disruptions last summer in Washington, Los Angeles and New York. The FCC said that emergency reporting will help the commission decide how to deal with outages in the long term.