NEWS                                    April 18, 1996

NYNEX CEO SEIDENBERG TO HEAD NEW NE TWORK 
RELIABILITY AND INTEROPERABILITY COUNCIL 
 
     Chairman Reed E. Hundt today announced that Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and CEO
of NYNEX, will Chair the newly re-chartered Network Reliability Council, which has been
renamed the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council to reflect its new mission.  
Hundt thanked Richard C. Notebaert, Chairman and CEO of Ameritech, for leading the
Council during the previous year two years.  The Council's members are senior
representatives of providers and users of telecommunications services and products, including
the satellite, cable television and wireless industries. 

     Under its revised charter, the Council will develop recommendations to the
Commission as to how it might best accomplish responsibilities placed on it by Section 256
of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  These include developing procedures to oversee
coordinated network planning by providers of telecommunications service and participating in
the development, by standards-setting organizations, of public telecommunications network
interconnectivity standards.  The purposes of Section 256 are, first, to promote
nondiscriminatory accessibility by the broadest number of users and vendors of
telecommmunications products and services to public telecommunications networks through
(a) coordinated network planning and design and (b) interconnectivity of public networks and
devices to those networks, and, second, to "ensure the ability of users and information
providers to seamlessly and transparently transmit and receive information between and across
telecommunications networks."

     The Council was first formed in January of 1992 following a series of major telephone
service outages.  Under the leadership of Paul Henson, former President and CEO of Sprint,
the Council analyzed the causes of telephone service outages and recommended steps that can
be taken to avoid or mitigate them.

     In 1994 the Council's membership was expanded to include representatives of the
satellite, cable television, and wireless industries.  It was asked to examine a number of
reliability issues, particularly those raised by the entry of new service providers and by
changing telecommunications technologies.  The Council's 1996 report is available on the
internet at:  http://www.fcc.gov/oet/info/standards/nrc and is available in hard copy from
the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (202) 628-6380.

  -FCC-
For further information, contact Jim Keegan at (202) 418-2323.