*Pages 1--1 from Microsoft Word - 35695* SEPARATE STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN MICHAEL K. POWELL Re: New Part 4 of the Commission’s Rules Concerning Disruptions to Communications (ET Docket No. 04- 35), Notice of Proposed Rule Making Our homeland security agenda begins with reliable telecommunications infrastructure. Today’s Notice would give us headlights on the road to reliability. Numerous technological changes have occurred since the Commission adopted its communications disruptions reporting requirements more than ten years ago. These changes have facilitated the rapid deployment of new communications technologies and play an ever increasingly role in providing important services to consumers, our military, and emergency responders. Our outage reporting requirements have been directed primarily to the telephone industry. These reporting requirements have been successful in permitting the causes of certain types of disruptions in telephone networks to be identified and corrected. This, in turn, has permitted organizations to develop "best practices" for use by carriers and manufacturers in reducing the likelihood, and length, of network outages. Today, we adopt an NPRM that proposes to streamline and apply our disruption reporting to other communications providers including wireless, cable, and satellite. It is essential that they take into account newly emerging forms of communications upon which we have become so vitally dependent. The timely provision of outage information by multiple communications providers should provide sufficient information to facilitate the prompt discovery of outage and reliability problems that occur to communications networks. In addition, such information should further facilitate efforts by communications providers to discover potential vulnerabilities in their systems. 1