On May 12, 2011, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) seeking comment on its proposal to extend the FCC’s Part 4 outage reporting requirements to Interconnected VoIP providers and broadband service providers.   Currently the FCC’s Part 4 outage reporting requirements apply only to providers of legacy circuit-switched voice communications services and/or paging communications services provided over wireline, wireless, cable, and satellite networks. The reporting requirements generally require providers to submit an electronic notification to the FCC within 120 minutes of discovering that they have experienced a power outage of at least 30 minutes in duration.   The rules are intended to provide the FCC with valuable information regarding network outages to enable the FCC to address communication system vulnerabilities and help prevent future outages.

Under the proposed rules, the outage reporting requirements will apply to both fixed and nomadic Interconnected VoIP providers.  The NPRM also seeks comment on the definition of outage reporting for these services, the proposed reporting thresholds, the effectiveness of mandatory reporting, how the reporting process should work, what information should be reported, and whether the outage reports should be treated as confidential.

Clients with questions regarding the NPRM should contact the attorney assigned to their account.