Verizon and Verizon Wireless defended the carrier’s actions following the June 29...
Verizon and Verizon Wireless defended the carrier’s actions following the June 29 Mid-Atlantic derecho wind storm and subsequent 911 outages. The defense came in reply comments which the FCC posted Wednesday. The FCC is in the midst of an investigation…
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of the northern Virginia 911 problems. Fairfax County, Va., recommendations were “constructive” and its derecho account “largely consistent” with the carrier’s own, Verizon said (http://xrl.us/bnoiir). Verizon “already fixed the specific problems” at hand and is “taking corrective actions ... including an audit of backup power resources and prompt remediation; redesign of the monitoring/telemetry system; additional redundancy in ALI [Automatic Location Identification] and trunk transport; and enhancing the methods and procedures for communicating information to PSAPs and the public,” it said. Verizon supports about 2,000 PSAPs, or public safety answering points, overall, and not all “may desire or need a Verizon representative to be present at an Emergency Operations Center,” the carrier said, referring to feedback received from northern Virginia 911 directors (CD Aug 15 p1). Deploying Verizon representatives may not be “feasible or optimal” during such natural disasters, it said. “Not all PSAP customers will necessarily want to share their own outage-related information with other PSAPs,” Verizon added. Verizon opposes any FCC mandates that it “take particular action to implement specific best practices,” which “would embroil the Commission in judgment calls about network configuration that are not amenable to a regulatory mandate,” it said. Verizon also opposes the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ recommendation (CD Aug 21 p5) that the FCC adopt backup power requirements. Those requirements “would impose one-size-fits-all operational and technical requirements that entail expansive regulation of network operations, without accounting for disparities in carrier resources, differences in service provider network configurations and localized PSAP concerns and resources,” Verizon said. The FCC’s original backup power rules wouldn’t have prevented the outages anyway, it said. The FCC “should direct the CSRIC [Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council] to determine whether to supplement or modify existing best practices in the areas of network monitoring, backup power, 911 network redundancy and diversity, and PSAP communications,” Verizon concluded its reply.