Another Massive Hurricane, Another Reason Why Congress Must Pass the RESILIENT Networks Act

If we want to make any progress on [connecting Americans] during hurricane season, then we need Congress to pass the “Reenforcing and Evaluating Service Integrity, Local Infrastructure, and Emergency Notification for Today’s Networks — or RESILIENT Networks — Act.” Congress should pass the RESILIENT Networks Act as quickly as possible. Neither the Federal Communications Commission nor state governments have taken the needed steps to update our regulations governing repair of physical networks to reflect modern network construction. The biggest change — that communications networks are no longer self-powered — requires that the FCC and the Department of Energy (through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) work together to require power companies and telecommunications companies to coordinate. That takes federal legislation. But we also need to recognize that we can’t require every network to maintain reliability on its own. We need networks to use the redundancy that comes from having competing networks to provide the reliability we used to have from a highly regulated monopoly provider.