CTIA, USTelecom Raise Concerns About Revised Part 4 Rules

comment on imposing Part 4 outage reporting requirements on broadband providers for the first time. CTIA and representatives of member companies met with Daudeline Meme, an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a filing in docket 15-80 said. “CTIA reiterated its support for targeted revisions to the Part 4 requirements that can provide meaningful and reasonable improvements to outage reporting, including standardized and simplified methods for calculating the number of users potentially affected by a wireless network outage and for reporting a wireless network outage to a Public Safety Answering Points [sic],” CTIA said in a filing at the commission. “CTIA also encouraged the Commission to refrain from subjecting wireless providers to unworkable rules, including those pertaining to required reporting of congestion in the radio access network, partial loss of communications to a PSAP, and sharing of [Network Outage Reporting System] data lacking effective, meaningful safeguards designed to protect such data from unauthorized disclosure.” USTelecom reported on meetings with aides to all five commissioners. “In each of these meetings, USTelecom emphasized that the Report and Order contained provisions that would increase the costs for companies to comply with new obligations without clear corresponding benefits for consumers or improvements in infrastructure reliability or resiliency,” the group said. “We noted that resources that would now have to be redirected towards implementation and subsequent reporting efforts would detract from other initiatives with clear consumer benefits such as upgrading or expanding facilities that would increase broadband availability.”