T-Mobile today agreed to pay $17.5 million in a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission over two 911 outages in August last year. As part of the settlement, the wireless provider has also agreed to adopt more stringent compliance measures for its 911 reliability.
The FCC was investigating two outages on August 8 that resulted in nearly all T-Mobile customers not being able to access emergency services through 911 for about three hours total. More than 27,000 calls to 911 are placed each hour from all mobile carriers combined.
“The Commission has no higher priority than ensuring the reliability and resilience of our nation’s communications networks so that consumers can reach public safety in their time of need,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a press release. “Communications providers that do not take necessary steps to ensure that Americans can call 911 will be held to account.”
While outages can be damaging, the outage itself wasn’t the only thing that drew the FCC’s attention; T-Mobile was also under investigation for its lack of timely warning about the outage. The FCC requires that carriers provide notification of an outage to 911 call centers so they can take appropriate steps.
“The safety of our customers is extremely important and we take the responsibility to provide reliable 911 service very seriously,” T-Mobile said in a statement to GeekWire. “We have made significant changes and improvements across a number of our systems since last year, and we will continue working to improve these critical systems with our partners to provide the standard of service our customers rightly expect from T-Mobile.”
As part of the settlement, T-Mobile will implement a process developed with the FCC that entails identifying risks to the carrier’s 911 systems and developing services to detect future outages and procedures for alerting 911 call centers in the case of future outages. The carrier will also file detailed compliance reports with the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau.
This isn’t the first FCC fine for downed 911 access. CenturyLink and Intrado Communications paid $16 million and $1.4 million respectively for an April 2014 outage that lasted six hours.
