Mutual Aid Pact Urged for Phone Providers : Communications: FCC chief says formal agreement may be ordered if industry doesn’t act to avert service disruptions.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission strongly urged telephone industry representatives on Tuesday to establish a formal means for assisting each other in quickly restoring telephone service during inadvertent disruptions.

FCC Chairman Alfred C. Sikes told members of the FCC’s Network Reliability Council that “a mutual aid and restoration” pact among telephone service providers “needs your careful consideration and concrete results.”

Outside the meeting, Sikes said that if the industry did not act on its own, the commission might mandate a formal arrangement to preserve the reliability of key telephone lines--those serving 911 emergency systems, airports, nuclear facilities and military sites.

Although a few locales, including New York City, have sponsored mutual aid phone pacts, some carriers say such agreements are inconsistent with a competitive telecommunications marketplace.

After an Oct. 9 incident in which a Sprint switching station flooded--disrupting service to 1.6 million residents in the Southeast--competing long-distance carriers offered help.

But they objected to any formal arrangement for mutual aid, according to a report by the FCC’s Common Carrier Bureau.

Sikes’ recommendation came as the Network Reliability Council, an industry group established by the FCC to study the outage problem, predicted that there will be about 200 service disruptions over the next 12 months, each affecting at least 30,000 phone customers.

The prospect of such widespread disruption in a phone system that has become the bloodstream of national commerce has galvanized consumer groups, lawmakers and business recently to demand action.

“If your phone service goes down, you are losing 911 emergency lines and the ability to make other calls,” said Ken McEldowney, executive director of Consumers Action in San Francisco. “Consumers are very dependent on the phone for help in emergencies, whether it is medical or fire.”

Since the council began tracking phone problems on April 6, there have been 89 major outages affecting 50,000 or more customers and 66 minor outages.

About a quarter of all local telephone companies now detail outages under rules that require reports when disruptions affect systems serving 50,000 or more customers.

However, the council said that if the threshold were lowered to include systems serving 30,000 or more customers, more than half of all local phone companies would be covered.

With more data in hand, the council said it could better study disruptions--especially difficult-to-diagnose software glitches apparently being triggered by the technology at the heart of the phone systems’ newest services, such as caller ID and automatic call back.