As of Friday, several Florida counties devastated by Hurricane Michael have registered double-digit outages in their wireless service, which is currently one of the only means available for many of Michael’s victims in those areas to get any help from the outside world.
Four Florida counties are still registering double-digit-percentage outages in wireless service, according to the FCC’s latest status report— Bay at 47 percent, Gulf at 34.8 percent, Washington at 20.5 percent and Gadsden at 19.4 percent.
The failure of the telecoms to restore service has created a handy political football for Florida’s Senate Race between Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Rick Scott, both of whom had slammed these admittedly easy targets for their slow response to the disaster. Trump FCC head and former telecom lawyer Ajit Pai—whose claim to fame thus far has been to work on behalf of the telecommunications industry to end net neutrality and open the door to massive fee hikes—took the out-of-character step of condemning the telecoms as well (something he notably did not do in the wake of the near total obliteration of wireless service following Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico).
As noted in the Politico article linked above, the speed by which wireless service is restored in the areas devastated by Michael may actually decide the Florida Senate election, as well as other downballot elections in the state. So it’s more than useful to trace the root cause of the widespread outages, and more importantly, why wireless service is taking so long by the telecom companies to be restored.
The main culprits appear to be Trump FCC head Ajit Pai and Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott.
As pointed out by ArsTechnica, in his rush to radically deregulate the telecom industry, Pai specifically repealed the very rules that President Obama passed following Superstorm Sandy. Rules which would have protected consumers from the same lengthy power and service outages that victims of Hurricane Michael are experiencing right now.
Among other things, the November 2017 FCC action eliminated a requirement that telcos turning off copper networks must provide Americans with service at least as good as those old copper networks. This change lets carriers replace wireline service with mobile service only, even if the new mobile option wouldn't pass a "functional test" that Pai's FCC eliminated.