Remarks of FCC Commissioner Clyburn at Consumer Advisory Committee

[Speech] My approach when it comes to public safety issues, has been shaped by three, key guiding principles: people with accessibility and access challenges must benefit; we should do all we can to educate every consumer about these safety benefits; and collaboration among all stakeholders works better than litigation.

Since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2007, the Federal Communications Commission has been studying ways to improve the resiliency of commercial wireless networks. In 2016, we opted to monitor a voluntary CTIA led initiative which sought to improve coordination among wireless carriers, state and local governments, and consumers, in preparation for outages that result from natural disasters. I believe it is now time for the agency to revisit this issue and a great place to start would be with the Consumer Advisory Committee working with the agency’s Hurricane Task Force on lessons learned from the outages we saw during Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey.