T-Mobile has been ordered to pay a large fine in the amount of $17.5 million after not complying with the FCC standard and not notifying the agency of two outages on August 8, 2014 of the mandatory 911 service. This has resulted in the company facing mandated changes and much scrutiny.
THE FCC POSTED THE FINE TO T-MOBILE ON JULY 17TH
The Federal Communications Commission posted on July 17 about T-Mobile’s $17.5 million fine for failing to address two national outages lasting nearly three hours on August 8, 2014 that affected the 911 response communications. The FCC is now requiring the mobile carrier to agree to a new compliance plan that would ensure that customers will remain connected with emergency services at all times.
COMPLIANCE PLAN INCLUDES NOTIFYING AFFECTED 911 CALL CENTERS
This compliance plan involved identifying the risks and reasons that the 911 services were stalled, how to prevent against these risks and detecting these outages, notifying the affected 911 call centers of the outages and quickly restoring the emergency services. This FCC is essentially ensuring that public safety communications are readily available. The FCC’s highest priority is to ensure that the all emergency communications within the country are working so that customers can be helped when needed.
With the FCC’s fine of T-Mobile being the highest fine this year, other carriers are on notices. The FCC is very serious when it comes to customer’s abilities to render emergency services. Chief of the Enforcement Bureau finds this to be very important because Americans across the entire country rely on 911 and emergency services in their times of need. The FCC is taking some serious steps to ensure the reliability of the country’s 911 networks.
MOBILE PHONES ARE REPLACING TRADITIONAL HOme PHONES
Mobile phones have quickly replaced house phones or land lines as the mobile phone rates are getting lower and the deals and plans are usually good prices. According to FCC statistics, over 27,000 calls per hour are made to 911 from all the carriers. T-Mobile’s 50 million customers offer a large amount of people that went without any first responder services.
The FCC has implemented a few programs that force carriers to follow the same guidelines that were given to T-Mobile in order to ensure that none of the other carriers have an issue like this again. Hard lines force a routing system that doesn’t allow for any failure and mandates any outages lasting more than 30 minutes.
