FCC Chairman Wheeler describes multistate 911 outage report as ‘terrifying,’ vows to take action quickly
During the report presentation, it was noted that the 911 vendor—Intrado—eventually rerouted calls from its Colorado hub to its other call center in Miami, which allowed the impacted PSAPs to start working again. During a post-meeting press conference, Simpson said that having a single backup does not provide the kind of reliability that is ideal for 911.
“After an earthquake, you want 911 to work,” Simpson said. “If all of the lines east of the San Andreas fault are no longer in place [after an earthquake], 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].”
Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), said the report should not cause people to fear IP-based solutions or next-generation 911—indeed, the PSAPs affected in the multistate outage still have legacy 911 architecture, according to the FCC report—but the report should be used to identify vulnerabilities in the system that should be addressed.
“It is inevitable, it will come, and it will better serve the American public,” Fontes said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “So, learn about it, learn its strengths, learn where it can be improved, and embrace it—ensure that it happens.
“The next-generation system is designed for resiliency. It is designed for redundancy. It is designed to move. So, if a center goes down, the traffic could easily be moved to a different state or a different part of the country—assuming that the country as a whole was in a next-generation 911 environment. That’s why I think there is a critical need to ensure federal support for upgrading our 911 systems into a next-generation 911 environment, which should address those types of issues raised by the commission.”