Emergency Reporting Act

What this does

The bill puts two reporting duties on the Federal Communications Commission around communications outages during disasters. First, whenever the Disaster Information Reporting System has been activated for at least seven days, the Commission must hold at least one public hearing each year on those events, and it must consider including state, local, and tribal officials, affected residents, carriers, first responders, and others. Within 120 days of each hearing, the Commission must issue a report, to the extent known without collecting new information, on the number and duration of outages of broadband, VoIP, mobile, and mobile data service, the users and infrastructure affected, outages that cut off 911 centers from caller location or from routing emergency calls, and any recommendations to improve network resiliency. Those reports go on the Commission's website, with confidential information excluded. Second, within one year of enactment, the Commission must investigate and publish a report on the value to public-safety agencies of including visual information in outage notifications to 911 centers, the volume of 911 outages that may go unreported under current thresholds, the burden on service providers, and recommended rule changes. The bill states that nothing in it gives the Commission authority over broadband providers beyond what the section specifically authorizes.