Emergency Communications

Most Puerto Ricans are just trying to reach family members. Few have access to Wi-Fi hotspots or electrical outlets. Sustained winds of 155 mph obliterated 95 percent of Puerto Rico's wireless cell sites, leaving much of the country a deadzone. In the past week, Puerto Rico's government has received more than 110,000 outside calls, many, no doubt, from panicked relatives. Remote places like Arecibo, near the western part of Puerto Rico, were particularly hard-hit. Here, the only reliable mode of communication is radio. And amid the silence, a determined network of radio hobbyists, affectionately called "hams," is helping communities make contact.

Ham radio is an older technology, archaic by some modern standards, but highly customizable. Hobbyists must pass a test to obtain a license, so the term "amateur" is something of a misnomer. As of 2015, there were 726,275 hams in the US, and six million worldwide. These networks are remarkably resilient in bad weather, with the exception of solar storms.

For the more than five million Puerto Ricans living on the United States mainland, it was bad enough to watch news reports on Sept 19 of Hurricane Maria ripping through an island where relatives and friends lived. What made it worse was not knowing how their loved ones had fared.

With the entire power grid knocked out and with more than 95 percent of wireless cell sites out of service, communication was all but impossible on Sept 21, and an already emotional day became even harder for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the hurricane’s impact on the island’s communications infrastructure had been “catastrophic,” and that the commission was trying to help. Some services, like texting and a few internet messaging apps, were reported to be working, but not consistently.

For all their seeming immateriality, the internet and the cloud rely on a vast industrial infrastructure consisting of data centers linked through a sprawling network of fiber optics. The facilities are stacked with servers — boxlike computers that crunch the data for everything from hospitals, law enforcement agencies and banks to news websites, email and weather reports — that cannot be without electricity and cooling for even a fraction of a second. Yet even as millions of people lost power across Florida, and thousands of homes and businesses were flooded out in Miami and Texas, the heavy digital machinery at the heart of the internet and the cloud held firm. Though the storm disabled some cellphone towers and local connections, Jeff Eassey, a manager for Digital Realty who hunkered down in the Miami building, said the center never stopped processing and transmitting data. It lost utility power around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 10, but supplied its own electricity with generators.

On June 22, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a Report and Order in this docket establishing Commission procedures for administering the state opt-out process as provided under the Public Safety Spectrum Act, as well as delineating the two-prong statutory standard by which the Commission will evaluate state alternative plans. The Report and Order resolved all issues, except the standard under which the FCC would review compliance with “Prong 2” of the statutory test. The Report and Order directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (Bureau) to issue a Public Notice establishing an expedited comment period for public comment on ex parte filings submitted by the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) on this standard. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said, "With today’s Order, we take another step towards the creation of a nationwide interoperable public safety broadband network. Specifically, we finalize the technical criteria the Commission will use to evaluate plans from those states that elect to optout of the network that will be deployed by the First Responder Network Authority."

In a filing to the Federal Communications Commission, the AWARN Alliance blasted T-Mobile for disparaging its efforts to developed an advanced emergency alerting system based on the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast system. T-Mobile has called ATSC 3.0 “an inferior platform” compared to the "well-established wireless network.” On the contrary, AWARN charged, it is the wireless network that is inferior and that T-Mobile. What’s more, it said, T-Mobile and other wireless carriers are actively resisting current FCC efforts to improve their emergency alerting.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will be in Florida on September 18. They will jointly inspect the damage caused by Hurricane Irma, meet with those engaged in recovery operations, and receive updates about the ongoing efforts to restore communications services.

In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, I was pleased to see the United States Senate’s unanimous passage of the SANDY Act of 2017 last night. We know that weather-related emergencies and other disasters can occur anywhere at any time–and this legislation comes not a moment too soon. Among other things, it promises to help speed restoration of essential communications in times of disaster. Kudos to Senators Cantwell, Booker, Thune, Nelson, Rubio, Menendez, and Schumer for their leadership as well as to Congressman Frank Pallone for his previous work to secure passage of this legislation in the House.

Here at the Federal Communications Commission, the 16th anniversary of the September 11 attacks reminds us that we must do all that we can to improve emergency communications. As it happens, September is also National Preparedness Month. So there’s no better time to recognize that effective communications can be the difference between life and death—whether emergency personnel are responding to a terrorist attack, hurricane, earthquake, flood, or tornado....

But despite the value of social media in times of disaster, our experience with Hurricane Harvey also underscores the importance of not confusing social media as a substitute for calling 911. During the disaster, for example, some public safety entities warned that social media was not the best means of communicating emergency rescue requests. All of this points to the need for best practices about how to communicate effectively both about 911 outages and during 911 outages.

I believe what we need now is a Federal Communications Commission report on these storms. We need to know what worked, what didn’t, and where we can improve our communications infrastructure. Once we know the facts, we need a full plan for fixing the communications vulnerabilities we are finding, including what you are discussing today—how to deal with the impact on 911. This report also will need to include a framework for rebuilding so that the communities with damaged communications facilities are not permanently relegated to the wrong side of the digital divide. Because one thing is for sure—Mother Nature’s wrath is sure to visit us again. It is incumbent on us to learn from these disasters to improve emergency response and infrastructure recovery.

I’m going to talk about what the Federal Communications Commission is doing to promote innovation and investment across the Internet ecosystem. Along with security, people primarily look to government leaders to help create the conditions that make it easier for the private sector to deliver economic growth, jobs, and personal opportunity. And to grow our economy, create jobs, and expand opportunity in a world that’s gone digital, we need world-leading Internet infrastructure that serves as a platform for innovation and entrepreneurship.