A new FCC report blames T-Mobile for the carrier’s outage in mid-June. The FCC T-Mobile outage report looks at the causes and impact of the outage and also recommends steps to avoid similar problems in the future.
The outage raised the ire of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai when it occurred on June 15, as Telecompetitor reported.
The outage lasted half a day, meaning that the many of the carrier’s customers had no access to calling, texting or 911 service. Nearly half (41%) of all calls failed during the outage. Additionally, data access wasn’t available in many areas until service was restored.
The FCC blamed the outage on a combination of equipment failure and misconfiguration of network routing. The outage was magnified by a software flaw in T-Mobile’s network that had been latent for months and interfered with customers’ ability to initiate or receive voice calls during the outage. The flaw had existed for months, and according to the FCC, it kept customers from making or receiving calls.
“T-Mobile’s outage was a failure,” Pai said in a prepared statement about the FCC T-Mobile outage investigation. “Our staff investigation found that the company did not follow several established network reliability best practices that could have either prevented the outage or at least mitigated its impact. All telecommunications providers must ensure they are adhering to relevant industry best practices, and I encourage network reliability standards bodies to apply their expertise to the issues identified in this report for further study.”
To prevent such outages in the future, the FCC recommended that carriers audit the diversity of their networks on a periodic basis and that standards bodies examine network reliability issues.
The FCC also recommended that the largest transport providers help smaller providers ensure their networks maintain reliability.
