The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today
extended mandatory reporting of network outages to service provided by Voice
Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.
The following is attributed to Harold Feld, legal
director of Public Knowledge:
“We are pleased the FCC has extended outage reporting
requirements to VoIP. As the Commission
recognized, this reporting must be mandatory in order to collect the necessary
data to analyze the outages. At the same
time, we are disappointed that this data, as with other reported outage
information, will not be made public.
“As we said in our comments filed with the Open
Technology Initiative last fall, the reporting burden will be minimal on VoIP
providers.
“We will continue to monitor the issue of voluntary outage
reporting by broadband service providers given the uncertain status of the FCC
authority over broadband service.”
Public Knowledge is a Washington D.C.- based public interest
group working to defend consumer rights in the emerging digital culture. More information is available at http://www.publicknowledge.org.