Submarine Cable Licensees Required to Report Outages

July 13, 2016

The Federal Communications Commission (Commission) has released a Report and Order that, for the first time, imposes mandatory outage reporting requirements on submarine cable licensees. Under the Commission’s new rules, which will take effect six months after approval by the Office of Management and Budget, licensees that experience qualifying outages will be required to submit three filings to the Commission: a Notification, an Interim Report, and a Final Report. For submarine cables that are jointly owned and operated by multiple licensees, the licensees may designate a Responsible Licensee to file outage reports on behalf of all licensees on the affected cable.

A summary of the Order is available here.