AG25
QST de W1AW  
ARRL Bulletin 25  ARLB025
>From ARRL Headquarters  
Newington CT  August 25, 2015
To all radio amateurs 

SB QST ARL ARLB025
ARLB025 FCC Universal Licensing System, Other Applications to be
Down for Maintenance

FCC website maintenance in early September will make the Universal
Licensing System (ULS), the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS),
the Electronic Document Management System (EDOCS) and other public
applications unavailable for more than 5 days. The Commission said
the outage will begin at 2200 UTC on Wednesday, September 2, and
continue through the Labor Day weekend. The maintenance work should
be completed by 1200 UTC on Tuesday, September 8. During the ULS
outage, it will not be possible to file any Amateur Radio
applications.

'[M]ost Commission resources normally accessible through the
Commission's website, including access to all electronic filing
systems and electronic dockets, will be inaccessible for the same
period, with the exception of the Network Outage Reporting System
(NORS), the Consumer Help Center (CHC), and the Disaster Information
Reporting System (DIRS), which will remain available,' an FCC Public
Notice said on August 20. 'The Commission's website will remain
available, but with reduced content and limited search
capabilities.' According to the Public Notice, the FCC will follow
its normal schedule of operation during the maintenance period, but
voicemail will be offline, and most Commission staffers will not
have access to e-mail. Static content webpages on the fcc.gov
domain, such as the FCC consumer guides, should remain available
during the outage.

The FCC will extend filing deadlines for all regulatory and
enforcement filings that fall during the maintenance period. Filings
due on September 2, 3, 4, or 8 now will be due on Wednesday,
September 9. 'Except for the due dates specified herein, we are not
automatically extending the deadlines for any other comment or
filing periods that will be running during this time period, but
requests for extension of time will be considered consistent with
the Commission's normal practice,' the FCC Public Notice said. 'To
the extent the due dates for filings to which reply or responsive
pleadings are allowed are affected by this Public Notice, the due
dates for reply or responsive pleadings shall be extended by the
same number of days.'

In a blog, 'Modernizing the FCC's IT,' FCC CIO David Bray said that
with the world and the technology we use are changing rapidly, 'the
information technology used by the Federal Communications Commission
must change as well.' Bray said the FCC has 'made significant
progress to upgrade and modernize our infrastructure, and we
continue to work on modernizing the FCC's legacy IT systems with the
resources we have available.'

'We understand that this temporary downtime before and during the
Labor Day Weekend may be inconvenient for some FCC stakeholders,'
Bray added.