Year of Storms Said to Point to Why FCC CSRIC Remains Important
The FCC’s newly rechartered Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council is closing in on its first reports, some maybe ready at the next meeting in March, members said during an abbreviated meeting Tuesday. This year’s storms demonstrated the importance of CSRIC work, said Chair Brian King, T-Mobile senior vice president-national technology service delivery and operations. “It has been quite a challenging year I think from a hurricane and windstorm perspective,” and now California wildfires (see 1712070070), he said. “Nothing underscores the mission of CSRIC more than some of those events.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The Next Generation 911 Working Group is focused on the NG-911 transition, said Chair Mary Boyd of West Safety Services. “We have responsibilities to review the existing best practices and develop additional guidance regarding the overall monitoring, reliability, notification and accountability in preventing 911 outages.” The group is looking at ways to detect outage “precursors,” Boyd said. The focus is on tools that are already available and not burdensome to implement, she said. The group also will look at cybersecurity issues, she said.
The working group also is looking at the NG-911 transition for small carriers, Boyd said. “We have to provide advice to them on how to operate within a state or region in order to be ready on time to deliver their 911 traffic in an NG-911 compatible manner." The group is looking at economic issues and barriers faced by small carriers, she said. It's developing a NG-911 economic readiness checklist for carriers, she said. A report is due in June.
Farrokh Khatibi of Qualcomm, chair of the Comprehensive Re-imagining of Emergency Alerting Working Group, said, as someone who lives in California, he has a special understanding of the need for timely alerting. The group is looking at existing technology and how it can be improved or whether new technology is needed, he said. “Everything is on the table,” Khatibi said. “We need to understand what is the best way to get the important information to the folks who need it immediately.” The group will look at whether there are any “missing pieces” on how alerts are done today, Khatibi said. Its reports are due in June and in September, he said.
The timing is perfect for Network Reliability and Security Risk Reduction Working Group work as industry moves closer to 5G, said Chair Travis Russell of Oracle. The group is doing work on the diameter protocol, an authentication, authorization and accounting protocol for computer networks, “and its use within wireless networks,” he said. The group is looking at the border gateway protocol used for routing internet traffic. “We’re seeing some rather interesting incidents taking place across the internet,” Russell said. The group plans a third report on 5G and the IoT, he said.
Russell just completed a series of meetings in Asia and Europe with cybersecurity experts and hackers. “There is an ongoing, very aggressive focus on telecommunications,” he said. “It’s the new frontier, if you will, for the hacking community. We need to be diligent.” The unit has three reports due next year, starting with one on the diameter protocol in March, he said.