Verizon Settles With FCC Over Last Year's 911 Outage

In April of last year, multiple states experienced 911 service outages, and as part of that Verizon in particular had an outage in California that affected about 750,000 people and 13 different call centers. The outage took place for several hours, and Verizon did not notify officials about it as it was required to do. This spurred an investigation into the matter, something that has been going on for a while now and that was recently settled between the two entities.

Says the FCC, Verizon will be paying $3.4 million as part of that settlement. The commission announced the settlement in a report earlier today, and according to it there will be some other requirements on Verizon's part under the settlement that it must meet henceforth.

There's a "compliance plan" in place, and as part of it Verizon needs to identify any possible disruption risks, protect against those risks, detect any 911 outages that might happen in the future, respond to those outages in such a way that includes notifying the call centers, and recover from the outage in a timeframe that is "timely".

Said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler about the matter, "Americans must have confidence that they will be able to reach 911 in an emergency. We take seriously our obligation to ensure the nation's 911 systems function reliably. We will continue to work with providers to ensure that advances in 911 technologies lead to improved communications between citizens and first responders."

SOURCE: FCC