FCC Reminds Companies to Follow Network Reliability Best Practices

The FCC reminded telecom providers to “follow industry best practices to ensure network reliability, consistent with” Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council recommendations. The Public Safety Bureau said Wednesday this is meant to underscore “lessons learned” from T-Mobile’s June 15 outage (see 2010220030). Providers and public safety entities “should periodically audit the physical, logical, and provider diversity in their networks segment(s) to ensure that a single outage will not simultaneously affect different circuits or equivalent data paths,” the bureau said. It said 911 service and originating service providers need to ensure alternative routing of emergency calls if primary and secondary routing is unavailable. “Consider validating upgrades, new procedures, and commands” affecting networks “in a lab or other test environment that simulates the target network and load prior to the actual application in the field,” the bureau said. Service providers “should use virtual interfaces for routing protocols and network management to maintain connectivity to network elements in the event of an outage due to the failure of a physical interface.” Entities should “actively monitor and manage 911 network components using network management controls, where available, to quickly restore 911 service and provide priority repair,” the bureau said. “Ensure that spare equipment for critical network systems is readily available.”