FCC tech-transition ruling has no impact on utilities’ critical-communications data, UTC official says

Utilities are not at a point where they believe it is necessary to ask Congress to develop a solution, Kilbourne said.

“We haven’t gotten there yet,” Kilbourne said. “It’s not like we’re trying to stop the transition from taking place. But should it become unmanageable, I think at that point we would have to consider going to Congress and ask them to weigh in.”

Although technically unrelated to utilities, Kilbourne said he was encouraged by the fact that one of the stipulations for carriers halting telephony-voice offering is that carriers must offer customers at least 8 hours of backup power and indicated that more robust power backup could be required in the future.

“It’s not anything that directly affects us, but it’s a nice precedent that the commission is starting to realize that 8 hours is insufficient for anything that’s meaningful,” Kilbourne said.