Commissioner O’Rielly urged the FCC to act to counter calls to 911 from cellphones that are no longer in service
FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly urged the FCC to act to curtail the number of calls to 911 from cellphones that are no longer in service, but under agency rules must still be capable of calling 911. The FCC raised the…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
issue in a 2013 notice of inquiry (http://bit.ly/1nmd1CE), five years after public safety groups asked the FCC to change its rules, citing the huge number of fraudulent calls to 911 from users who can’t be traced. In a Tuesday blog post (http://fcc.us/1sSQZbA), O’Rielly said public safety groups asked that the phones no longer be allowed to call 911, when they responded to the NOI. But the FCC has taken no further action, he said. O’Rielly said public safety officials have repeatedly brought the issue to his attention. “Public safety officials have told me that some consumers are inadvertently dialing 911, while others are intentionally prank calling 911,” he wrote. “Whether inadvertent or intentional, the Commission needs to review its existing rules to ensure that they do not enable unwanted 911 calls to emergency personnel.” Pocket or “butt-dialing” 911 has also emerged as a big issue, O’Rielly said. “While the full scope of the problem is not known, my visits to the New York City and Anchorage Public Service Answering Points suggest that roughly 70 percent of 911 calls are made by wireless devices and 50 percent or more are the result of pocket dialing,” he said.