Telecom Daily
Welcome to Faulkner's Telecom Daily. We publish Monday through Friday, updating top stories as events warrant.
Friday, October 23...
FCC Releases Staff Report on June's Major T-Mobile Outage
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
posted a new
staff report detailing its findings on the cause and impact of the
nationwide T-Mobile outage which occurred
on June 15, 2020. According to the regulator's investigation, the downtime
lasted over 12 hours, impacting calling, texting, data, and 911 services for
customers across the country. The agency's Public Safety and Homeland Security
Bureau estimates that approximately 41 percent of all attempted calls failed
during the outage, including 23,621 calls to 911. As for the cause, the FCC
points to "an equipment failure" that was "exacerbated by a network routing
misconfiguration." While T-Mobile had already admitted as much, the FCC further
claimed that the outage was worsened 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 regulator's report
includes a series of network reliability best practices that it expects T-Mobile
to implement to prevent any recurrence of such issues in the future, as well as
network reliability issues that it would like "standards bodies" to examine in
the future.
AT&T Reports Booming Mobile Customers, Slipping finances for Q3
AT&T posted its financial results for the third
quarter of the 2020 fiscal year. For the period, the telecom giant reported
revenues of $42.3 billion, a modest decline from the $44.59 billion posted for
the same period in the prior year. Net income for the quarter came in at $2.76
billion, a more severe drop from the $3.7 billion posted one year ago. This
translated to earnings per share of $0.39, compared to the year-ago quarter's
$0.50 figure. On the subscriber front, AT&T Mobility reported its best quarter
in two years, adding a net total of 5.5 million subscribers, 645,000 of which
were postpaid phone adds. However, AT&T suffered the same video losses being
seen across the industry, with 590,000 TV accounts having been lost during the
quarter. This was offset somewhat by the 357,000 fiber broadband net additions
reported for the period. AT&T's decision to drop its DSL services in many
locations resulted in 29,000 accounts being lost due to a lack of viable
replacement services in those locations.
Quibi Confirms Shut-Down Plans
Short-form streaming video service service Quibi
confirmed it is shutting down. The entertainment offering was only in
operation for around six months, during which it failed to capture anywhere near
the audience needed to justify its costly advertising and content budget. This
will likely come as a particularly massive disappointment to investors, which
The Wall Street Journal
notes provided the service with $1.75 billion, only $350 million of which
remains in its coffers. These unspent funds will be returned to investors now
that the service is closing up shop. The aforementioned confirmation letter
blamed Quibi's failure on "one of two reasons: because the idea itself wasn’t
strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our
timing.” However, the service was plagued from the start by complaints about
factors such as a total lack of access on non-mobile screens, a lack of
compelling content, and the availability of free alternatives such as YouTube.
While there is currently no specific date for the service to shut down, the
company expects to inform subscribers via messaging in the "coming months."
....Michael Gariffo, Faulkner Information Services
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