FCC Chairman Wheeler describes multistate 911 outage report as ‘terrifying,’ vows to take action quickly
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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.”
yea where is that money being
yea where is that money being used for we pay as a tax on r phone bills wheres all that mon
This problem was clearly not
This problem was clearly not a software “glitch” anymore than someone programming a trunking system with 20,000 users that it is limited to 5 channels calling the resulting busies a “software glitch”. All systems that have capacity limitations, which is all systems, need to have appropriately engineered limits set to manage the traffic in the system. When traffic hits those limits, whatever they are, the response should be predicable and deterministic. Whatever the cap was that was placed in the system, the response should not have caused the network failure that occurred. Calls may have been blocked but the network should not have been knocked down as it was. As we move more and more to a non-switched circuit network, the potential for this type of failure increases significantly due to the complexity of the network software. Only rigorous testing and meticulous design will keep this from happening. Since so much of these new networks is hidden from the end users, I think independent testing should be established to test the networks to verify their performance under varying loads and failure conditions.