FCC Says Cabling Issue Extends IT Upgrade

The FCC has pushed its timetable for getting all its databases and systems back up and running after a holiday weekend IT revamp from Tuesday, Sept. 8, to 8 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 10, after some extended and unexpected cabling issue it attributed to its new commercial provider threw a wrench into the agency's best laid plan.

The Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) is now back online, and the commission said in a notice that it expected to have the EDOCS document management system back up by the end of Tuesday.

The Network Outage Reporting System (NORS), the Consumer Help Center (CHC), and the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), remain up and running, as they have throughout the upgrade, the FCC said.

Throughout the Labor Day holiday, FCC staffers were laboring to move more than 200 servers and over 400 associated applications to commercial provider in a move to save money and improve resiliency by transferring legacy applications to the cloud.

"Our servers left FCC headquarters in seven moving vans after midnight and arrived safely at the new commercial data center facility early Friday morning," blogged FCC CIO David Bray.

"While all the data and infrastructure arrived intact, upon arrival we discovered the need for some additional cabling to be done by our commercial partners that took longer than expected. Unfortunately, this delayed completion of all of the system upgrades – even with the FCC team working around the clock throughout the holiday weekend."

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.