F.C.C. Backs Swedish Company to Run American Phone Routing System

[NWCorona]

Source: NYT

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission has decided to make a European-owned company the clearinghouse for routing billions of cellphone calls and text messages across the United States, despite claims by critics that the plan poses national security risks, officials said on Thursday.

The F.C.C.’s approval, which has not been publicly announced, will give a New Jersey subsidiary of Ericsson, the Swedish technology giant, the obscure but critical job of operating a sprawling national system to track and route wireless calls and texts among hundreds of service providers.

The routing system began in the 1990s as a way for people to keep their cellphone numbers when they switched carriers, but intelligence and law enforcement agencies have come to rely on it to track and trace phone numbers in investigations.

The contract, worth as much as a billion dollars over seven years, has been held since 1997 by a small Virginia company, Neustar. As part of an intense bidding process, the Ericsson subsidiary, Telcordia, told the F.C.C. it could do the work much more cheaply than Neustar, and it earned the backing of many large carriers.

Read more: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/business/fcc-backs-swedish-company-to-run-american-phone-routing-system.html?_r=0&referer=

[riversedge]

1. Nat. security risks involved. will repugs yell and scream?

[jtuck004]

2. We broke up AT&T, cost ourselves millions of jobs, refuse to invest in ourselves. We could and

should do this in house, including the training, education, and manufacturing.

So we give away the learning and control that would go with an entire segment of an industry. That's the real security problem for our future.

[NWCorona]

3. The same thing was happening in the military as I was leaving

Things that were once handled in house are now being farmed out to the likes of Haliburton.

[karynnj]

11. This was originally an American company best known as Bellcore

Started when AT&T was broken up. Many Bell Labs people were assigned to it.

[Democat]

4. The company is in New Jersey?

"a New Jersey subsidiary of Ericsson"

The headline sounds bad, but the will the jobs stay in America?

[nolabels]

9. When i think of NJ and Jobs my mind gravitates to thinking it has to do with the mob

Sort of like goodfellas movie. Sad thing is mostly a lot of the upper tiers of a lot of US business could be considered the mob by 1960s standards

[Jopin Klobe]

5. Of course everyone realizes ...

... that having a foreign company take this over, means that they (and the NSA, CIA, whoeverthehell) will have proprietary control over all the information ...

... and we all know how well that works with our current "voting system" ...

... The People have lost The Country to the oligarchs ...

[NWCorona]

6. I take it you are aware of the recent court ruling regarding off shore servers

[snooper2]

8. Do you even have a clue what the contract is for? Wikipedia NANP, not a big deal LOL

I love how they have people write these articles who have no idea what they are talking about. They make it sound like every single fucking phone call in the US goes through Nuestar today

A lot of companies use Nuestar for CNAM as well. It is HUGH! They have a database matching your name, with- YOUR PHONE NUMBER! OMG!

except for wireless of course

[jimmil]

7. I worked for Ericsson..

In the 1980s. It is an international company with software development done in the US, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Saudi Arabia, China, and probably more now. The software they had was crap. With development done is so many places it was extremely slow from development of code to software release. When they came into the American market they were no longer dealing with governments but with real companies with deadlines to market and such. Companies could not wait for two years for a feature to come out. When I was contracted I put billing onto a disk. Prior to that, billing was written to tape and this was the 1980s. No one did tape by then. All things said, their hardware was brilliant. It made up for a variety of sins of the software. It was very good.

In the end, I can't say if anything will be compromised as far as software development. People can transfer to any location the company has if a job is available. Want to spend a couple years in Australia? Check for a job. Same with the US. Several Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, etc. were he in the US working. So, people in China or Saudi Arabia could come to work here if they applied. Is that a security threat? I don't know. If a problem is found in the software the extremely long lead times for roll out could be a problem too. Again, I don't know. The decision has already been made however.

[karynnj]

10. This was originally an American company best known as Bellcore

When AT&T was broken into AT&T and the regional phone companies, Bellcore got many Bell Labs people supporting projects dealing with the local companies. That was in 1984. They later were acquired by Ericson.