FCC Acts to Improve Network Reliability During Disasters

The Federal Communications Commission updated its rules, and proposed additional updates, to improve communications network reliability, resiliency, and transparency during disasters and outages. The rule changes will increase participation in, and enhance the use of, the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), in which service providers report on their operational status during emergencies. Certain types of communications providers are required to report network outages to the FCC’s Network Outage Reporting System (NORS) on an ongoing basis. To address gaps in NORS, the FCC adopted rules that:

• Require cable communications, wireline, wireless, and interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers to report daily infrastructure status information when DIRS is activated for geographic areas in which they provide service.
• Suspend NORS reporting obligations when providers are required to report in DIRS during a disaster, so they are not obligated to report twice.
• Require DIRS filers to provide a single, final summary DIRS report to the Commission within 24 hours of the deactivation of DIRS