Multistate 911 outage could lead to changes in emergency-calling regulations, operations

Instead, it might be time to establish some sort of independent certification process that would allow a review of each third-party 911 service provider business operations and practices to ensure that the meet the requirements associated with 911. After meeting all of the requirements, the third-party vendor’s certification would be known publicly, saving individual carriers significant amounts of time in the due-diligence process.

Creating the certification criteria should be a collaborative effort of vendors, carriers, trade associations, PSAP coordinators and government. If such a certification process was established, determining what organization would actually implement it likely could be a topic of lively debate. Whoever does take on the task will need considerable resources, because it promises to be a labor-intensive process.

Conceptually, I can see such a certification process helping ensure that a third-party vendor has sufficient redundancies in place to serve 911 and that the company understands the importance of failover and backup strategies.

What concerns me is whether any kind of certification process would have prevented the massive April outage. Who’s going to look at the lines of software code to make sure this—or something else—doesn’t happen again? Or that software is written correctly, so that calls that need to be rerouted to a backup facility automatically go there, instead of waiting for hours for a manual switchover, which apparently happened in this case?

And we haven't even touch upon potential cybersecurity threats to 911, which promise to be an huge issue.

Exactly how the federal government should be involved in 911 is a topic that could be—and should be—debated for some time. But it seems clear that these outages and the migration of 911 to IP-based systems point to the need for federal involvement in an arena that previously has been dominated by state and local regulation.

Such incidents also portend a change in the way that carriers and third-party 911 vendors handle emergency calls. What the FCC eventually proposes in the wake of this report likely will be only the first step, as the FCC, other federal agencies and even Congress likely will have more to say on the matter.

The ultimate results are anybody’s guess, but it is reasonable to expect that carriers and/or third-party vendors will have to invest some time and money into their 911 procedures to ensure that outages like those that happened in April do not happen in the future.