Federal Communications Commission updates network outage requirements

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), under a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR), is to require wireless, wireline, cable, and satellite providers to electronically report significant network disruptions. Current reporting requirements cover only wireline and cable telephony. The FCC cites the country's increasing use of cell phones and growing dependence on alternative communications as the primary reason for expanding regulations that mandate outage reports.

There are three additional forces at play:
* First, the speed with which network outages are identified and communicated is an important element in business continuity and resilience. To facilitate timely reporting, the FCC is requiring that providers use a standard electronic template submitted over the Internet. This should simplify the reporting requirements, the FCC concludes, and enable the government to quickly discover reliability problems and improve homeland security.

* Second, the regulation will require providers to notify the FCC of outages when critical infrastructures are adversely affected by the disruption. The existing regulation specifies only part of the critical infrastructure community, including "major airports, major military installations, key government facilities, nuclear power plants, and 911 special facilities." Representatives in other sectors, such as banking and finance, transportation, and energy should review the proposed rule and consider whether commenting is appropriate.

* Third, the FCC is proposing to require outage reporting whenever "critical transmission and network control technologies" are disrupted. This aspect of the proposed rule recognizes the importance of such technologies to network reliability. Audit and forensics experts may need to consider the new rule for strategic planning purposes.

Source: Zeichner Risk Assessment Newsletter. To subscribe to this weekly newsletter, click here.

•Date: 17th February 2004 •Region: N.America •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms cont.
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