988 Order Expands on Legal Authority, Reconciles Effective Date

The FCC's outage reporting order approved 4-0 at its July open meeting (see 2307200041) expands on why the agency isn't requiring originating services providers to notify covered 988 service providers about outages, saying doing so wouldn't help improve the 988 Lifeline's reliability, according to our side-by-side comparison with the draft order. The finalized rule was released Friday. If an outage is in an originating service provider's network, it's unclear what the value is of covered 988 service providers starting to troubleshoot their own networks, the FCC said in the order. The finalized order also adds a paragraph expanding on its legal authority. And it adopts USTelecom-suggested language to harmonize the compliance timeline for the 988 outage reporting rules with the compliance timeline for 911 outage reporting rules adopted last year (see 2307140017).