FCC Staff Asking More Questions on Followup Order to Derecho Report
With the comment cycle now complete, FCC staff members appear to be pushing forward on an order addressing new rules in the aftermath of the 911 outages reported during last June’s derecho storm, said commission and public safety officials. The National Emergency Number Association and AT&T both reported last week on follow-up meetings with Public Safety Bureau staff to explain the comments they filed last month (CD May 30 p6).
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At the March FCC meeting where an NPRM was approved, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel urged the commission to act before the first anniversary of the June 29 storm (CD March 21 p4). Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn called the findings of an FCC report on the derecho “somewhat troubling.” It’s unclear at this point whether Clyburn will tackle a followup order on her watch, public safety and FCC officials said.
"I sense that they want to get the information in, so it seems to me they are proceeding as usual -- in other words, they're not letting the transition slow them down,” a public safety official said Friday. An ex parte filing described a meeting with officials from the Public Safety Bureau. “During our presentation, we explained NENA’s vision for a risk-based approach to ensuring network reliability,” NENA said (http://bit.ly/196HkET). “Specifically, we explained how carriers and SSPs [system service providers] could have flexibility to choose network reliability approaches that best fit the relative risks to specific facilities as well as the relative impacts to public safety should those facilities fail. We also explained our belief that risk-based analysis could dovetail neatly with the Commission’s proposed certification approach by allowing carriers and SSPs to certify that they have conducted risk analysis for 911 related facilities and that they have implemented reliability improvements consistent with the results of those analyses, subject to some minimum baseline requirements."
AT&T said in an ex parte filing that staff for the company were called in to answer questions about AT&T’s “Diversity Analysis Reporting Tool (DART), which monitors physical and logical diversity of critical circuits in AT&T networks, including 911 circuits” and Automatic Number Identification and Automatic Location Identification links (http://bit.ly/13qqkEO). DART had been mentioned in earlier comments (http://bit.ly/18TYWkS) by AT&T, the company said. “During this discussion, the Bureau clarified that the FCC was not proposing the type of physical audit of circuits referred to in AT&T’s comments, but was thinking in part that physical diversity could be audited through other means,” AT&T said. “Additionally, AT&T reiterated its position on backup power at central offices and network monitoring set out in its May 13, 2013, Comments. ... At this meeting, AT&T produced a simple diagram of the typical 911 system to help address the questions posed by the Bureau.”