FCC approves rules to ensure 911 reliability, but dissenters worry about ‘federal takeover’ of emergency-calling system
“The FCC alone isn’t going to be able to prevent (another outage),” PSHSB Chief David Simpson said during the press conference following the meeting. “We can’t do this without the states, without the local municipalities that, in fact, make the decisions regarding the equipment in the PSAPs itself and without the companies that provide the end-to-end capabilities that allow a call-to-completion, that chain to actually complete itself.
“What we at the FCC can do is create an environment where the responsibilities of each of those players in that end-to-end, call-to-completion chain are clear—they know what to expect of each other … And then, when they design their element of service, they’re doing so in a way that’s mindful of that, ‘Boy, stuff’s going to break, but if it breaks, we need to have designed a resilient enough system where the call still goes through.’”
But Pai said the rules will “hamstring” 911 service providers.
“Before making any number of changes, including how they route 911 calls or assign responsibility for technical support, they would need to file a public notice with the FCC,” Pai said. “They would need to provide detailed information about the proposed change, and then they would have to wait at least 60 days before moving forward.
“Imposing mandatory, across the board, one-size-fits-all waiting periods will not produce an agile, responsive 911 system.”
O’Rielly said that he believes the proposed rules go too far and indicated that the FCC is straying from “its traditional light touch approach for these services.”
“It is clear from this overall effort that the real goal is not to solve the challenge at hand to the extent needed, but instead capture any and all market participants in an overly prescriptive and unnecessarily regulatory labyrinth,” O’Rielly said.
“Unfortunately, the steps proposed in this item would add more cost to the providers—and, ultimately, consumers—for little to no benefit.”