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Feds Fine Verizon $3.4 Million Over 911 Service Outage Issues

Posted by timothy on from the can't-get-through-to-you dept.

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.

11 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. needs to be higher / ceo / vp jail time by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    needs to be higher / ceo / vp jail time that will stop BS like this from happening.

  2. You want to get their attention? by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Make the fine a (large) percentage of their annual gross revenue.

    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
  3. The answer is obvious by plopez · · Score: 2

    Deregulate!

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  4. Not to do the Maths for you, but by rmdingler · · Score: 2
    Six hours is 25% of a single day, thus for the year, they were out of pocket six one hundredths of a percent of the time.

    I have been described as risk-averse, and I could work within those tolerances.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but by nanoflower · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but by Obfuscant · · Score: 2

      Not a lot of work to save a few million and possibly save some lives.

      How does telling the PSAP (public safety answering point) that cellular 911 service is out save lives? How does the PSAP tell people who can't call in that they can't call in?

      By the time it got to the newspapers, or the radio, it would be over.

    3. Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but by cheater512 · · Score: 2

      Which is why SLA's are usually monthly not yearly. Otherwise you could just do a 100 year SLA to get really low numbers.

      6 hours would completely smash a 99.9% SLA which should be the minimum emergency services should have.

    5. Re:Not to do the Maths for you, but by mjwx · · Score: 3, Informative

      How does telling the PSAP (public safety answering point) that cellular 911 service is out save lives? How does the PSAP tell people who can't call in that they can't call in?

      It tells the local police to send out more officers on patrol, patrolling officers can be instructed to keep an eye out. Calls direct to the station will be taken more seriously.

      I'm sure the local emergency services have a contingency plan for then PSAP goes down.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  5. Re:3.4 mill? by ShaunC · · Score: 4, Informative

    In fact it might have. Reporting the issue immediately would have given the affected emergency services a chance to get the message out via television, radio, Facebook/Twitter/etc. and use the opportunity to remind the public of the non-emergency numbers. A few days ago my local PD's domestic violence hotline had some kind of outage, and a temporary backup number was all over the news right away. A 911 outage would affect a lot more people, and the sooner they know to put out the info, the better.

    --
    Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
  6. See where Washington's priorities lie? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

    So Verizon gets fined $3.4M for a 911 outage that endangered some possibly significantly large number of lives. In 2011 Google paid a $500M fine for the crime of carrying advertising by Canadian pharmacies offering discounted prices to American consumers for filling their prescriptions.

    Next time you vote on the national level, keep in mind that your federal government considers the "threat" of competition undercutting the pharma lobby's price monopoly 145.35 times more of an offense than having the 911 service not work when you need it.