More than 18% of cellsites in Puerto Rico were out of service and 267,111 cable and wireline subscribers were down, said Friday’s disaster information reporting system release on the island-wide power outage there. The FCC’s Public Safety Bureau activated its emergency response measures Thursday over the outage, and Friday was the due date for the first reports. The bureau issued public notices Friday on emergency contact information for licensees that need special temporary authority and on 24-hour availability of staff. One FM station was reported out of service, but no public safety answering points are down, the report said.
The omicron variant is the latest test for already stretched-thin 911 centers managing with the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency call officials told us last week. Public safety answering point (PSAP) professionals said staff taking sick leave is the main challenge. PSAPs are more prepared than they were at the beginning of the pandemic but are also experiencing higher-than-normal staffing issues amid a national trend of workers quitting jobs in the “Great Resignation,” said National Emergency Number Association (NENA) 911 and PSAP Operations Director April Heinze in an interview.
An FCC report showing a bump in 911 fee diversion in 2020 frustrated former Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). The agency reported that some states diverted more than $207 million in 2020. Don’t adopt a safe harbor or grace period to comply with the fee diversion order, said CTIA in comments posted Friday in docket 20-291 (see 2112210037). CTIA opposed petitions for reconsideration from Colorado’s Boulder Regional Emergency Telephone Service Authority and City of Aurora 911 Authority, saying the requests would “undermine Congress’s intent.”
The FCC deactivated the disaster information reporting system for the Kentucky counties affected by tornadoes earlier this month, said a public notice Monday. The final DIRS report of the incident, released Monday, showed 0.5% of cellsites down in the affected counties and 5,868 cable and wireline subscribers without service. Sunday’s report showed 6,438 cable and wireline subscribers without service and 1.1% of cellsites down. No public safety answering points, TV or radio stations were reported out of service.
An FCC disaster information reporting service release Friday showed 14,161 cable and wireline subscribers without service in the Kentucky counties affected by recent tornado damage. That’s better than the 24,790 reported Thursday (see 2112150051). Some 1.2% of cellsites are down in the affected area, down from the 1.8% in Wednesday’s report. No public safety answering points, TV stations or radio stations were listed as out of service.
Four companies will pay $6.3 million in penalties for 911 outages last year, the FCC announced Friday. Some said they had made procedural changes to avoid a repeat. Lumen will pay $3.8 million, Intrado $1.75 million, AT&T $460,000 and Verizon $274,000. Both Lumen and AT&T said their blackouts involved work by vendor Intrado. See our news bulletin here.
The FCC Public Safety Bureau activated emergency response measures for 17 counties in Kentucky, after the recent tornado strikes, said public notices and releases through Wednesday. The disaster information reporting system was turned on Tuesday. The bureau issued PNs on emergency contact information for licensees that need special temporary authority and on 24-hour availability of staff. A PN reminded essential personnel about availability of priority telecom services overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for when local networks are damaged or congested: Entities working in emergency response that haven’t enrolled should consider participating in PTS. No public safety answering points, TV stations or radio stations were listed as out of service in Wednesday's DIRS report. It listed 24,817 cable and wireline subscribers as without service, and 0.8% of cell sites in the affected counties as down.
An FCC Further NPRM on curbing illegal robocalls to public safety answering points and improving the PSAP Do-Not-Call registry got mixed reaction from public safety organizations and industry in comments posted Thursday in docket 12-129 (see 2110010065). Commissioners approved the item in September. Comments were due Wednesday.
T-Mobile will pay $19.5 million to settle an FCC investigation into the carrier’s June 2020 emergency 911 outage (see 2006180047), said an Enforcement Bureau order Tuesday. The consent decree requires T-Mobile to implement a compliance plan including enhanced 911 outage notices to public safety answering points that will include more information, with follow-up notices required within two hours of initial notification. The disruption, caused at first by failure of a leased fiber transport link, lasted more than 12 hours and caused complete failure of more than 23,000 911 calls, plus about 23,000 calls without location information and about 20,000 calls to PSAPs without callback information, said the bureau. “The outage revealed, and was compounded by, a temporary routing flaw in a single location and two previously undetected flaws in third-party software. Restoration was also impacted by a temporary failure of remote access to the affected transport link.” T-Mobile gets “how critical reliable connectivity is to ensure public safety and we take that responsibility very seriously," a spokesperson emailed. "Following this outage, we immediately took additional steps to further enhance our network to prevent this type of event from happening in the future. Now, with this consent decree, we are moving on from the FCC’s investigation and continuing our focus on our ongoing network build.”
The FCC wants comments by Dec. 16 on information collection requirements for its public safety answering points robocall Further NPRM, says Tuesday's Federal Register (see 2110010065). Comments should be sent to OMB control number 3060-1183 at reginfo.gov and PRA@fcc.gov. The FCC wants comments on how to "reduce the information collection burden" for businesses with fewer than 25 employees.