FCC Says 2000 Bug Not a Problem for Phones
Despite mounting concern among experts and lawmakers, the Federal Communications Commission will tell Congress today that it does not foresee a meltdown of the nation’s phone system when 2000 arrives and computers may start scrambling dates.
FCC Chairman William E. Kennard said in an interview Monday that while his agency is not anticipating serious problems, he acknowledged that the FCC has only recently begun efforts to evaluate industry progress in dealing with the so-called millennium computer bug.
“The telecom industry is ahead of the game relative to other industries we regulate,” Kennard said. But he added, “it is vitally important that we keep the pressure on and keep the industry ahead of the problem.”
The issue relates to the six-digit formula used by many computers to express the month, day and year of an event. While the mm/dd/yy formula is simple and economical, the downside is that it leaves 1900 numerically indistinguishable from 2000.
Such a glitch could be especially insidious for the telecommunications industry, where every telephone call or data connection creates a date and time record for billing, routing and archiving.
So far, little is known about whether phone switching and billing equipment will malfunction because of software bugs. But with about 600 days left before the calendar turns to Jan. 1, 2000, the lack of information on the nation’s telephone system made government policymakers and business owners anxious.
“In order to create contingency plans, you have to know what conceivably could go wrong in the phone network,” said Cathy Hotka, vice president of information technology at the National Retail Federation in Washington.
“It’s difficult for a store to even open if their phone line is down; you won’t be able to complete a real-time credit card transaction . . . or dial 911 if somebody is hurt,” Hotka added. “So the thing that makes us nervous is that we are not able to get good information” about potential problems.
Kennard declined to disclose details of the testimony he will give to the Senate Commerce Committee. But he and other FCC officials said they believe the telecommunications industry is faring at least as well as other key sectors, such as banking, transportation and the military.
Leading telephone equipment makers such as Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent Technologies Inc. and Northern Telecom Ltd. of Toronto say they have mounted furious campaigns to fix potential year-2000 problems and have urged their customers to upgrade any troublesome phone equipment.
But experts acknowledge that the nation’s telephone system is an interdependent network that could be undone by any number of factors.
One major fear is that other nations might not be aggressively trying to uncover potential year-2000 problems. That could overload international circuits and cause systems in the U.S. to fail, said one FCC official, who declined to speak on the record.
Another fear is that equipment and software not tested under real-world conditions could cause a computer crash similar to the one AT&T; Corp. experienced this month when a maintenance blunder and software glitch caused a high-speed data network to go down for nearly 24 hours.
“Pretty much every piece of software has the potential for the problem,” said Bill Newman, senior manager in charge of broadband networks at Northern Telecom. “We put software in machines controlled by software that somebody else, like Microsoft, wrote, said Newman. So if just one link in the chain fails, he said, “it could be pretty far reaching.”
