Feds Fine Verizon $3.4 Million Over 911 Service Outage Issues

itwbennett writes The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has fined Verizon $3.4 million over its failure to notify police and fire departments during a 911 service outage last year. Under the commission's rules, Verizon and other carriers were required to notify emergency call centers of a six-hour outage that occurred in April. The outage involved multiple carriers and affected over 11 million people in seven states.

Comments

Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but

[nanoflower]

I'm sure you could but the telephone companies are held to a higher standard for 911 service. That being said the outage would not have resulted in the fines if only Verizon had notified the local fire/police offices. Sure that might take some effort but it is the least they could do while 911 service is out (one which people's lives can depend on.)

Hell, it might have been as simple as the head offices sending out an email to the local offices telling them to call their local police/fire departments which might have entailed a little discussion and a few minutes at the computer, followed by a few minutes on the phone at the local offices. Not a lot of work to save a few million and possibly save some lives.

Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is this article is not very fair. Verizon effected customers in this outage were a drop in the bucket of this outage and it wasn't caused by Verizon. It was caused by Intrado which currently controls most of the ALI (address relation) servers. Verizon most likely wasn't even aware of what was going on until they started getting reports from the psaps and even then most likely had no power to determine the severity of the outage.