New York PSC Urges Geographic Redundancy, Contingency Power Standards for Wireless and Broadband
New York regulators urged the FCC to adopt and enforce geographic redundancy requirements and contingency power standards for “critical” wireless and broadband facilities being studied in docket 11-60. But USTelecom, ATIS and the Telecommunications Industry Association said the commission ought to use a light touch in ensuring the safety of wireless and broadband emergency networks.
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The New York Public Service Commission said it adopted an order after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that required ILECs to do upgrades such as “geographic route diversity of critical interoffice facilities; retrofitting remote central offices for standalone capability … identification of the physical path of critical circuits and priority service restoration; and reliability audits of SS7 and E911 services.” The FCC ought to consider similar requirements for wireless and broadband providers, New York regulators said. “After implementation, 77 percent of central offices in New York were provisioned with geographic route diversity, covering 98 percent of the total access lines, substantially strengthening the reliability and resiliency of the ILECs’ networks,” the New Yorkers said in their comments. “The same standards for achieving continuity of service and network reliability for traditional telecommunications infrastructure should apply uniformly to wireless and broadband networks as these networks are increasingly reliant on each other and an outage or reliability concern focusing on one platform often impacts other types of infrastructure.”
But TIA, ATIS and USTelecom disagreed. “With more than 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure owned and operated by private companies, there are substantial market-based incentives to invest in secure critical communications infrastructure,” USTelecom said in its comments. There have been several hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and other instances of “severe weather” over the past decade but “there have been few major occurrences of severe overloads on communications networks,” USTelecom said. “This is largely the result of proactive management and preparedness by the networks owners in advance of such emergencies that allow for flexible responses in the event of network impacts during the emergency situation.”
Other commenters plugged their own product lines. Generac urged the commission to consider the utility of emergency generators; USA Mobility reminded the commission that paging “is a reliable and resilient communications system that has remained effective during prior disasters, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.”
The NAB urged the commission to “ensure -- and even expand -- the availability of broadcasters’ timely and extensive emergency information in times of need.” Broadcasters are still the nation’s best “first informers” because of its “powerful combination of ubiquitous availability and journalistic enterprise,” the association said. “Despite great advances in communications” since the dawn of radio -- “from cable and satellite technology to the rise of the Internet -- local radio and television stations are, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, irreplaceable as a means to inform the public,” NAB said.