Multistate 911 outage could lead to changes in emergency-calling regulations, operations
It will be interesting to see what actions the FCC will take in this matter. Will it make the carrier responsible for ensuring that 911 calls get to PSAPs, putting the burden of due diligence on the carriers to determine that its third-party vendors are sufficiently reliable and has architected its systems in a way that will not result in outages?
“The fact that it is outsourced does not mean you get to wash your hands of it,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said during a press conference after last week’s meeting. “That’s the issue that we’re going to be dealing with in the follow-on to that report.”
And how much redundancy is enough? David Simpson, chief of the FCC’s public-safety and homeland-security bureau, made it clear that he does not believe that Intrado’s approach of having just two data centers—one in Englewood, Colo., and one in Miami—is appropriate. Simpson said he lived through the 1969 earthquake in San Fernando, Calif., so the notion that that a large seismic shift associated with the San Andreas Fault could create a new island is something he has considered.
“After an earthquake, you want 911 to work,” Simpson said during a press conference following last week’s meeting. “If all of the lines east of the San Andreas Fault are no longer in place, you don’t want 911 capabilities in and around the Los Angeles metropolitan area to no longer work. So, I do think we need something better than a concentration of capabilities in one or two locations around the entire United States, because they just might not be there when you lay on top of these sunny-day [issues]—stuff breaks—real-world disasters.
“Miami is kind of prone to hurricanes. Had a hurricane come at the same time [as the multi-state outage], we would not have had that failover, perhaps. So I think there needs to be more [distribution of 911 capabilities].”
Even if policies regarding how various components of 911 should work, who will do the massive amount of legwork to make sure that the policies are being followed?
Initially, the easiest thing to do probably is to put this burden on the carrier, but it is questionable how much assurance that provides the public calling 911. After all, both the carrier and the third-party vendor have incentives to keep costs low and hassles to a minimum, so it might be tempting to cut corners to save both sides money.
Even if everyone has the best of intentions, how many carriers have the resources to thoroughly investigate the operations of third-party company bidding to provide 911 work—and, do the third-party companies have the manpower to address all the questions asked by a litany of carriers?