STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL Re: Amendments to Part 4 of the Commission’s Rules Concerning Disruptions to Communications, PS Docket No. 15-80, ET Docket No. 04-35, PS Docket No. 11-82, Report and Order, Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and Order on Reconsideration. Two weeks ago, households and businesses across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were jolted into the pre-digital past when without any warning they lost access to Internet and phone service. The culprit was an accidental fiber cut, a mistake by a third-party contractor. It was hours before this situation was fixed. In the interim, it was hard to connect with family and friends. Binge watching was out. Routine activities that require access to the Internet were impossible. Businesses lost untold access to customers. But worse, public safety was affected—as an unknown number of customers were simply unable to dial 911. What happened in the Northeast earlier this month is hardly unique. Last year, vandals in California destroyed fiber facilities, disrupting Internet access in San Francisco and Sacramento. Across the country in Florida, a construction error led to 14,000 broadband customers in Miami losing Internet service for hours. In Arizona, when an underground bundle of fiber-optic cables was maliciously cut in Flagstaff, cash machines went down, stores couldn’t process credit cards, and emergency dispatch services were lost. No matter where you live, when communications service shuts off, modern life grinds to a halt. This is not just inconvenient. It’s a dangerous new vulnerability. It’s a problem. But we cannot manage problems that we do not measure. That is why our action here is so important. We refine our existing rules for outage reporting in order to ensure that the data we receive is timely and accurate. Then we seek comment on outage reporting for consumer broadband service, because we need to understand communications vulnerabilities in order to address them. This public safety effort has my full and unequivocal support.