This is the second in a series of special reports on business continuity.

As hurricane season entered its most intense stage and Ernesto appeared to be bearing down on the Gulf Coast, telephone companies reminded their customers that preparation for a weather disaster includes such things as having a corded phone, making a family communications plan and getting network-based voice mail to be able to stay in touch with loved ones even if displaced or without local phone service.

A couple of communications industry veterans believe the telcos should add something to that list--free voice mail service in the event of large-scale disasters. Tom Evslin, founder of wholesale VoIP provider ITXC, and Jeff Pulver of pulver.com filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year, asking that agency to require incumbent telcos to provide free voice mail as a service to the community during disasters.

“It was very clear last year after Katrina that there is a problem,” Evslin said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “There were people in shelters not being findable by family members, and a lot of the times rescue workers were putting themselves in danger seeking out people who weren’t really lost but couldn’t be found. There were a lot of well-meant efforts to put up [online] bulletin boards, but the profusion of bulletin boards made things worse.”

The simple solution in Evslin’s eyes is to provide free network-based voice mail during a disaster. Because phone numbers are unique and continue to work even when the service is lost, having voice mail would allow displaced people to leave a message so family members calling in could learn of their status.

That opinion was reinforced last week, he said, when AT&T released a study that showed 54% of its customers said the service they most want during a disaster is voice mail. Evslin believes the phone companies should view this as a chance for service, not for profits.

In their responses to the Evslin-Pulver proposal, however, AT&T, BellSouth, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, Qwest, Sprint-Nextel, Verizon and Time-Warner Cable called free voice mail an expensive, inflexible and unnecessary action.

Instead of a rigid mandate in response to disasters, AT&T argued, the FCC should do what it did following Hurricane Katrina, when it “temporarily waived its Local Number Portability and number assignment rules, to the extent necessary to permit carriers to port customers’ numbers to remote locations.”

The company said there is also the chance that voice mail facilities will be knocked out when a major catastrophe takes down the phone network.

BellSouth responded negatively to the Evslin-Pulver proposal as well, but it has already set up a method of providing free voice mail when needed, working with state regulators in its nine Southeastern states, many of which have suffered from recent hurricanes.

“We have a set of standing tariffs set up at each of the nine state commissions, as part of our disaster relief plan,” said spokesman Joe Chandler. “What we do is, depending on the severity of the event, we go to the commission and work with them and decide if we want to make those tariffs effective. They include free voice mail, free remote call forward, the ability to move out of your residence and move back in one time with no charge--features that allow customers to maintain communications if they are out of their homes.”

In 2004, when BellSouth faced four hurricanes, it invoked those tariffs in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, Chandler said. Last year, after Katrina, it activated them in all nine states, realizing that Gulf Coast residents who were displaced had been scattered throughout the region.

“We do that disaster relief plan under coordination with state commissions because it is the right thing to do at that level,” Chandler said. “We don’t think we need a federal mandate to do this.”

BellSouth also said any FCC action should come after an independent panel examining Katrina and its aftermath has made its recommendations.

Evslin is still hoping the FCC will consider a free voice mail mandate as part of its larger disaster preparedness process, if not as a separate action. The agency has not yet taken action on the proposal. FCC officials were not available to comment on the matter this week.

Coming: AT&T and Verizon invest heavily in disaster recovery

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