Improving Outage Reporting for Submarine Cables and Enhanced Submarine Outage Data

In this document, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission or FCC) adopts final rules of a Report and Order requiring submarine cable licensees to report service outages through the network outage reporting systems (NORS). In doing so, the FCC seeks to improve overall submarine cable reliability and resiliency by enhancing the FCC's visibility into the operational status of submarine cables, which will permit the FCC to track and analyze outage trends. The Report and Order requires all submarine cable licensees to report service outages to the FCC, defined as a failure or significant degradation in the performance of a licensee's cable service regardless of whether the traffic can be re-routed to an alternate path. Licensees must report outages, including those caused by planned maintenance, of a portion of a submarine cable system for more than 30 minutes, or the failure or significant degradation of any fiber pair lasing for four hours or more. Lastly, the Report and Order will improve submarine cable deployment conditions and resiliency through better coordination of inter-agency permit review.