Wireless Service Improves in Areas Hit by Katrina

Cingular said it fully restored service in Mobile, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., and had reestablished “the majority of coverage capacity” in the Biloxi area. In New Orleans, it said, some calls are going through but at reduced levels. “New Orleans remains the company’s top priority, and more than 800 network technicians are deployed across the Gulf states to support full service restoration as soon as possible,” Cingular said. The carrier said it’s using microwave and satellite connections to restore service in parts of New Orleans and is rerouting calls outside New Orleans as needed.

Cingular said it “continues to make substantial progress in restoring service” in Meridian, Hattiesburg and Gulfport, Miss., with customers in those locations now able to send and receive calls at reduced levels. “Since many of the remaining service outages are primarily due to power and T1 lines, we are working closely with power and wireline companies and have deployed generators where possible in affected areas,” Cingular said. The carrier has used more than 500 generators, 240,000 gallons of fuel and more than 30 cells-on-wheels to support service restoration, it said.

Verizon Wireless said its service is “returning to normal in many areas,” while “improvements continue in hardest hit areas.” As of Mon., the carrier said, it had “good service with a few pockets of limited coverage” in areas around New Orleans and had restored service in the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Central New Orleans still has “wide spread outages with limited coverage,” Verizon Wireless said. In the Baton Rouge area, it said, “customers should not experience any problems except for a very few selected areas.” In Miss., the company said, the Jackson area has “normal coverage with no sites down,” while Miss. Gulf Coast coverage is limited. Most service on the Ala. Gulf Coast is restored, with instances of spotty coverage, the carrier said.

T-Mobile said it restored its wireless service to “many areas of downtown New Orleans,” including the French Quarter, Convention Center and Superdome, plus the airport. To keep as many people connected as possible, T- Mobile said it’s “enabling virtually all users of GSM/GPRS phones, whether or not they are T-Mobile subscribers, roaming access to the network in the area.”

Sprint Nextel said it has “made significant progress” in restoring Gulf Coast wireless and wireline services. More than 75% of wireless services in Miss. are now operational, but “safety issues continue to make it more difficult to get to some sites in the region,” the firm said. On the wireline side, the carrier said it rerouted long distance traffic around New Orleans, enabling customers to make long distance calls in the Tallahassee area and in the Florida Panhandle. The carrier continues to restore dedicated Internet access to corporate customers in northern Fla.

BellSouth Sees Millions of Dollars in Repair Costs

BellSouth said Hurricane Katrina would cost it $400- $600 million in repair costs. The estimate of capital and network restoration cost -- which the company said is preliminary and was made without a full assessment -- doesn’t include revenue lost while people can’t use phones. Analysts said though the outage is one of the most significant to hit the telecom sector in a long time, Katrina will cause BellSouth no long-term financial damage. They do expect a hit to quarterly earnings, but said investors won’t fret, viewing it as a nonrecurring expense. BellSouth said, based on field survey data, some 810,000 lines remain affected in the Gulf Coast’s hardest- hit areas. All but 19 of its 131 central offices in the area are operating, BellSouth said. The 19 serve some 187,000 access lines, 166,000 of them in the New Orleans area. Meanwhile, BellSouth installed a phone center with 25 lines at the Charlotte (N.C.) Coliseum emergency shelter for use by people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

The FCC continued to make temporary rule changes over the weekend to help communications companies cope with problems from Hurricane Katrina. Among FCC actions: (1) It waived a requirement that carriers reassign telephone numbers after they've been dormant for 90 days. The waiver lets carriers disconnect customer phone service and reinstate the same number when service is reconnected. Disconnection generally is done at customers’ request to avoid billing problems. “Due to the catastrophic nature of the damage to telecommunications systems, we expect that in many cases these customers may seek to reinstate their service after the 90-day period has lapsed,” the FCC said in an order Sun. (2) The FCC Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau on Mon. waived slamming rules so carriers temporarily can become service providers to customers otherwise unable to obtain service. Carriers would be able to add these new customers “without complying precisely with the Commission’s… carrier change procedures,” the FCC said.

(3) Granting an emergency request by the American Red Cross, the FCC temporarily assigned it the toll free number 1-800-RED-CROSS. The number was assigned to 1-800- IDEAS.com. The FCC said the American Red Cross will keep the number for a year, at which time the agency will decide if “any extension is warranted.” The FCC said the reassignment may mean costs for 1-800-IDEAS.com. The American Red Cross has said it will reimburse “reasonable costs of relinquishing this number.” Reassignment will “greatly assist the American Red Cross -- the only non- governmental agency assigned a role as a lead agency in the Nation’s National Response plan -- to perform its disaster relief, coordination, and fundraising efforts,” the FCC said.

FCC Chmn. Martin and the other commissioners thanked communications company employees “who, at great sacrifice, have been working nonstop for the past week to repair the communications infrastructure that is relied upon by the entire nation.” In a statement Tues., the Commission said “dedicated employees from wireline, wireless, broadcast, cable and satellite companies are working around the clock… restoring all these links will be as challenging a communications mission as we have ever confronted.”