Will FCC's National Broadband Plan address reliability?

The National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission is readying for Congress could include programs to ensure greater reliability and visibility into IP networks on which the nation's public safety agencies increasingly depend, the chief of the FCC's Communications Systems Analysis Division said Tuesday.

One of the jobs of the division, which is part of the commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, is to assess the condition of communications infrastructure to help ensure that they are available during emergencies, Jeffrey Goldthorp said during a conference on cybersecurity policy hosted in Washington by the Stevens Institute of Technology. Such information is available for traditional carriers, but not for IP-based networks, Goldthorp said. There also is a lack of visibility into conditions of the Internet's core, he said.