‰  NOW 18 WPM transition file follows‰

The FCC has announced that its Universal Licensing System, ULS, and
some other website applications remain offline for maintenance, but
the Electronic Comment Filing System, ECFS, is now back in service
and the Electronic Document Management System, EDOCS, should be
available in a short time. The remaining computer system upgrades
scheduled to have been completed by today, September 8, now are not
expected to be done until September 10, the FCC said in a Public
Notice.  As the ULS outage continues, it will not be possible to
file any Amateur Radio applications, including examination session
documents, or conduct any license or application searches.  Over
Labor Day weekend, a dedicated FCC team worked day and night to
complete major IT upgrades, the FCCs Chief Information Officer David
A. Bray, said in a statement. This work included physically moving
more than 200 different legacy servers out of FCCs headquarters to a
commercial service provider. This move, a cost saving measure, Bray
explained, ran into trouble when it was determined that additional
cabling was needed to complete the transition.  Unfortunately, this
delayed completion of all of the system upgrades, even with the FCC
team working around the clock throughout the holiday weekend, Bray
explained.  While the requirement to pay a regulatory fee for
Amateur Radio vanity call sign applications officially ended on
September 3, prospective vanity applicants now will have to wait
until the ULS is up and running again to file an application for an
available call sign. The FCC has told ARRL that the approximately 18
day vanity call sign waiting period will remain in place for now.
ARRL VEC Manager Maria Somma, AB1FM, said a lot of candidates and
volunteer examiners have begun asking why new call signs or license
upgrades have not yet been issued.  We have a huge back log in our
filing system that continues to grow, she said. We already have
approximately 75 examination sessions and over 500 applications
waiting to be released to FCC.  Bray said it took seven moving vans
to contain the servers being relocated. With a massive server move
of this scale, even with detailed planning, independent
verification, and backup plans, the opportunity always exists for
surprises, especially with legacy IT systems, nearly 400 program
applications, and hundreds of servers, he pointed out.  The project
will relocate the FCCs legacy computer systems to a commercial
service provider, helping to reduce maintenance costs, improve
resiliency, and allow the FCC to shift many of its legacy
applications to the cloud, as it has done with its Consumer Help
Desk.  The FCC said in its Public Notice that it anticipates all
systems and databases to be back online by 1200 UTC on September 10.
By that time, it said, the Commissions website will have returned to
normal operations, with full content and search capabilities
available. FCC voicemail and e mail also should be back by then too.
We will continue to work diligently and provide updates on these IT
upgrades, Bray said. The entire FCC team and I truly appreciate your
patience and understanding as we work to complete all of the
upgrades.

‰  END OF 18 WPM transition file ƒ