If FCC Changes 911 Rule It Should Give Industry Time To Adjust, Verizon Says
If the FCC changes its current rule mandating that old wireless phones be able to call 911 it should give the wireless industry time to adjust, Verizon officials told an aide to Commissioner Mike O’Rielly in a meeting. The FCC…
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sought comment a year ago on whether it should eliminate the 20-year-old requirement that “nonservice-initialized” (NSI) handsets -- cellphones no longer connected to a carrier network -- still must be able to connect to 911 (see 1504020047). Public safety groups supported dropping the requirement, but wireless carriers raised concerns (see 1506080043). The docket, 08-51, has been mostly quiet in recent months. Verizon said in a filing posted Monday representatives explained the technical steps Verizon has made to comply with the commission’s existing rule. “These include long-standing network routing and translation configurations that bypass established call authentication processes for 911 calls made over Verizon’s CDMA network,” Verizon said. “Verizon explained that removing this bypass to comply with the proposed rule change could lead to certain situations in which 911 calls from service-initialized handsets are snared in the call authentication process.” If the FCC changes the rule, “We emphasized the importance of allowing carriers sufficient time to comply with any rule change, and the key role that customer education by public safety stakeholders would play in making such a threshold change to this longstanding 911 policy,” Verizon said. Public safety requested the rule change, citing prank calls to call centers made on NSI phones.