AT&T Has To Pay Up Millions After Two Major 911 Outages Last Year (gizmodo.com) 37
AT&T has been fined $5.25 million for an outage last year that resulted in 12,000 callers not being able to reach 911. The FCC's Enforcement Bureau made the announcement on Thursday, stating that "such preventable outages are unacceptable." Gizmodo reports: Aside from the fine -- which is really a drop in the bucket for the billion-dollar behemoth -- AT&T must also make changes and enhancements to its systems to mitigate and soften the blow of future outages, as well as "regularly file compliance reports with the FCC." According to FCC rules, AT&T was required to "transmit all wireless 911 calls" as well as let emergency call centers know about outages if they last longer than 30 minutes. The two AT&T 911 outages investigated by the FCC, which occurred on March 8 and May 1 of 2017, lasted about five hours and 47 minutes, respectively. Around 12,600 users were unable to complete 911 calls during the March outage, with 2,600 failed 911 calls during the May outage.
Re:Oh no, not $5M (Score:4, Informative)
I don't miss the old days when you had to schedule long distance calls for 10:01PM on a Saturday night.
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I actually miss that. Long distance calls were expensive enough that people didn't call long distance just to try to sell you something or try to scam you.
Emergency calls got through, because Peggy at the exchange would make sure they did.
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I'm 54, and we had a rotary phone up until around 1974ish.
Regarding long distance, even in the Ma Bell era, different Bell companies had different rules for long distance. Where I lived, and when I was young, half the state had the same AC, so very definitely you had long distance calls within the same AC.
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How did that work? If the area code wasn't the same, it was long distance?
If it was a jack on the same switchboard, it was local. If it had to be patched through, it was distance. If it had to be patched through more than one exchange, it was long distance. That could take a couple of minutes to set up.
And there wasn't necessarily any area code. You could ask the operator for Somewhere County 1234.
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I used a bluetooth to POTS gateway to plug in my old rotary phone from college. I could actually dial a number and somewhere upstream of the bluetooth connection it would be properly interpreted and get me the right connection. I don't think my cell phone was doing the conversion, but I have no proof. This was just 2 years ago
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Circa 1963 my Southern California next door neighbor was a toll call. I had been given a couple of old wooden box crank ringer phones by a friend of my grandfather, who was at an East Texas rural phone company. My friend and I (I was around age 9) ran some speaker wire between our bedroom windows and connected these phones and an ordinary dry cell battery. It worked fairly well.
Be concerned. (Score:5, Insightful)
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to build out a wireless first responders network for FirstNet
Well you see, AT&T had to first implement ZeroNet and make sure it's implemented properly and works successfully. Sounds like it's a SUCCESS! Now all they have to do is rename it and their work is done.
that's a fine of $437/person (Score:1)
It seems very low, considering how critical 911 can be when you're in danger.
By comparison, a parking fine is around $70,
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...why you NEED a firearm, and why the 2A ought not to be infringed.
When seconds count, you might not even be able to contact the Police.
Similarly, every household should maintain a 24/7 working hospital and fire station, as wasting a few seconds calling 911 and waiting minutes for a so-called paramedic or fireman to turn up could be disastrous.
Get Used To It (Score:2)
911 will have to purchase priorty bandwidth from now on.
Big whoop (Score:1)
It doesn't matter (Score:2)