N.J. Admin. Code § 14:10-1A.11 - Prevention and reporting of service interruptions

(a) Each telephone utility shall take all appropriate measures to minimize service interruptions. Each telephone utility shall make provisions to meet emergencies resulting from failure of power, sudden and prolonged increases in traffic, absences of employees or from fire, storm, natural disasters, attacks or similar contingencies. Each telephone utility shall inform its employees as to procedures to be followed in the event of such contingencies in order to prevent or mitigate interruption or impairment of service.

(b) Each central office, and each remote central office that carries inter-community calls without routing them to the main central office, shall contain sufficient battery reserve to keep the office operational until auxiliary power can be placed into service.

(c) In exchanges exceeding 5,000 lines, the telephone utility shall install a source of permanent auxiliary power.

(d) A utility shall inform Board staff on the same business day or if the outage occurs outside the Board's normal business hours, at the beginning of the next business day, of any major service interruption, by telephone at a telephone number posted for that purpose on the Board's website. The utility contact person shall:

1. Explain what it believes to be the cause of the service interruption;

2. Describe the measures the utility is taking to remedy the problem; and

3. Provide Board staff with the telephone number of a utility contact that Board staff can reach at all times in order to monitor the situation.

(e) For purposes of this section, "major service interruption" means any network condition that causes 1,000 or more customers to be out of service for 30 or more minutes, causes an unplanned outage of, or completely isolates, a central office for 30 minutes, or disrupts 911 emergency call processing at Public Service Answering Points for any period.

(f) Each utility shall submit to the Board Staff all reports submitted to the FCC in accordance with 47 CFR Part 63, Notification of service outage.

Notes

N.J. Admin. Code § 14:10-1A.11

Recodified by 47 N.J.R. 489(a), effective 2/17/2015