Alaska’s GCI joins Sprint, T-Mobile and others paying a fine to the FCC tied to 911 service outages
The Federal Communications Commission continues to ding telecom operators for 911 service issues, with the latest involving Alaska-based carrier General Communications.
The FCC levied a $2.4 million fine on GCI to resolve an investigation into five 911 service outages across the firm’s wireless network over a nearly eight-year period. The investigation is said to have found that wireless customers were unable to reach first responders when making 911 calls due to a lack of “appropriate safeguards in its 911 network architecture and operational procedures.”
GCI also was cited for not providing “timely notification of three of the five outages to the affected 911 call centers,” and the operator did not submit timely network outage reporting system reports in four of the five outages.
“Americans should be able to reach 911 at any time, whether they live in New York City or a village in Alaska,” said Travis LeBlanc, chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, in a statement. “We will continue to work with service providers across the nation to ensure they meet this critical expectation to protect the public’s safety.”
In addition to the fine, GCI agreed to strengthen its 911 service procedures and adopt compliance measures to ensure it meets 911 service reliability and outage notification rules.
The FCC noted it requires wireless carriers to implement 911 routing and delivery systems to ensure calls are transmitted to the appropriate emergency call centers, to notify those call centers of 911 service outages lasting longer than 30 minutes, and to “timely notify” the commission regarding the nature and extent of those outages.
The FCC last year fined a handful of telecom operators – including Sprint – a collective $1.4 million in fines connected with 911 service failures, which followed $17.4 million in collective fines against CenturyLink and Intrado.
The biggest slap was reserved for T-Mobile US, which last year reached a record $17.5 million settlement with the FCC connected to a pair of 911 service outages in 2014.
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