In the April 19, Wall St. Journal, page B2, Col. 3, Staff Reporter Rebecca Blumenstein follows up last week's story on the FCC's "Network Reliability and Interoperability Council"(NRIC) meeting and assessment. NRIC is chaired by ATT chairman C. Michael Armstrong.

ATT's y2k czar, A. John Pasqua is quoted: "Internationally, it appears that the readiness has worsened." Some formerly medium risk countries are now high risk.

NRIC's report is quoted as saying: "The FCC remains concerned about whether enough is being done on a global basis to ensure that there are no significant network disruptions or failures."

NRIC has asked the State Dept. and other agencies for help in dealing with this problem.

The report concludes that most callers in the US should be fine, but the smaller of the 1,270 companies in the US are not keeping pace with remediation.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), April 19, 1999

Answers

Good find Puddin. For those with their blinders fully engaged (attention Y2K Prozac, Flint, Mutha, RMS, Paul Davis, Decker), lets repeat that:

ATT's y2k czar, A. John Pasqua is quoted: "Internationally, it appears that the readiness has worsened." Some formerly medium risk countries are now high risk.

-- a (a@a.a), April 19, 1999.

Is this the same global communications network over which the banking industry transacts zillions of dollars each hour?

Getting a dial tone so I can call Grandma in Florida is nice, but an international monkey wrench tossed into the inner workings of the banking/finance machinery would shudder the world economy.

-- rick blaine (y2kazoo@hotmail.com), April 19, 1999.

Readiness has WORSENED? How is that possible? Geez louise -- and here we thought we were trudging forward so slowly, when in some places they're going backwards.

PJ in TX

-- PJ Gaenir (fire@firedocs.com), April 21, 1999.

PJ, My guess, and this is only a guess, is that they didn't move backward, but they failed to move forward and are therefore at higher risk of not being able to fix the problem in time.

It's all part of the prediction game. "Trust us, we are reasonably confident that most mission critical systems will be ready." Statements such as that (which I made up) say little in the first place; even such meaningless waffle statements become less and less believable as the unavoidable deadline approaches with little or no remediation work being done. Therefore, medium risk changes to high risk.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), April 21, 1999.