Wisconsin state legislators should greenlight a new grant program supporting migration from the state’s “woefully outdated” emergency call system, Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association Executive Director Bill Esbeck said Wednesday during an Assembly State Affairs Committee hearing. The committee mulled AB-356, which directs the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs to award grants that reimburse next-generation 911 (NG-911) costs of ILECs acting as originating service providers. Covered costs would include IP-based transport, database management and the purchase, installation and maintenance of equipment. The bill would limit the department from awarding more than one grant per ILEC per fiscal year. The state’s current 911 fund, which gets revenue from a 75-cent monthly charge on customer bills, will provide enough money but doesn’t allow cost recovery after the NG-911 transition, said Esbeck. He said that five of 72 Wisconsin counties have connected to the state’s emergency services IP network, but ILECs in those places have yet to cut over to it. Wisconsin’s 2023-2025 biennial budget restricted diverting 911 fee revenue for unrelated purposes, Esbeck noted. In 2009, the state renamed its 911 money as a “police and fire protection fund” and diverted cash to a general fund, he said. The new grant program would support NG-911 only, said AB-356 sponsor Rep. Tony Kurtz (R). While future legislators or governors could change state law to resume 911 fee diversion, “I think everybody in the state understands how important this is,” he said. “We’d be very foolish to change that.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced Wednesday she’s rechartering the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council for another term. A primary focus of the council will be how AI and machine learning “can enhance the security, reliability, and integrity of communications networks in a nondiscriminatory, transparent, and socially responsible manner,” the FCC said. Other issues CSRIC will tackle include “the security and reliability risks unique to emerging 6G networks and the reliability of Next Generation 911 networks,” it added. The first meeting is expected in June, a year after its last meeting (see 2306260058).

The Nebraska Public Service Commission delayed a hearing planned Wednesday in its Windstream 911 outage probe due to the illness of “a key staff member,” a PSC spokesperson said Tuesday. The commission rescheduled the hearing for Dec. 28 at 9 a.m. CST. The commission plans a hearing Jan. 4 on Lumen’s recent 911 outage (see 2312060060).

National Emergency Number Association representatives met with FCC Public Safety Bureau staff on the group’s i3 standard and an ATIS standard for IP multimedia subsystems (IMS), in an attempt to offer clarity, said a filing posted Friday in docket 21-479. “There is some confusion with respect” to next-generation 911 standards, NENA said. “The IMS911 specification, ATIS 0500036, implements the NENA i3 standard in an existing IMS … system,” the group said: “It is a standard targeted towards existing IMS systems to offer i3 based NG9-1-1 services over their existing network. IMS911 and NENA i3 are complementary, and not competing, specifications and systems implementing them are expected to be fully interoperable.” NENA said all known NG-911 systems in the U.S. are using only the i3 standard at this point.

Frontier Communications must answer a complaint from the state’s E-911 Council, the West Virginia Public Service Commission said Wednesday. The council complained that 10 emergency call centers couldn’t receive 911 calls for nearly 10 hours during a three-day period last month, the PSC said. E-911 Council Executive Director Dean Meadows said Frontier has inadequate backup for times when vandalism or bad weather disables phone lines. The council has seen problems for the last two to three years, he said. “We’re really at our wit’s end about what ought to be done.” Frontier, which didn’t comment Thursday, must respond within 10 days, the PSC ordered Tuesday in docket 23-0921-T-C. On Monday, the PSC reported Altice improvements after the agency fined the company $2.2 million in February 2022 for service quality failures (see 2202090063). Customer complaints against Altice’s Optimum, formerly known as Suddenlink, dropped by more than half to 311 so far this year from 687 in 2022, the West Virginia PSC said. Chairman Charlotte Lane is pleased but will keep monitoring, she said. “Optimum’s attitude seems dramatically different from before.”

Verizon updated the FCC on its 911 location-based routing (LBR) implementation efforts at the request of the Public Safety Bureau, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 18-64. Verizon has fully implemented LBR for 414 public safety answering points, with another 277 in progress, it said: “Verizon has worked with its wireless 911 vendor Comtech to incorporate LBR in Comtech's centralized text control center … in a manner that supports LBR for 911 text messages nationwide.”

The Nebraska Public Service Commission on Wednesday scheduled hearings in two 911 outage investigations. A hearing on Windstream’s outage (docket 911-076) will occur Dec. 20 at 9 a.m. CST; another on Lumen’s outage (docket 911-075) will happen Jan. 4 at 9:30 a.m. CST, the PSC said. The hearings will let Nebraska PSC commissioners “ask questions and get answers directly from the carriers involved in these outages,” said Chair Dan Watermeier (R). Decisions will be made later, he said. The commission opened the probes in September in response to the carriers’ back-to-back 911 outages (see 2309120046).

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission will seek clarity on its definition of “basic emergency service (BES) outage,” said a notice of proposed rulemaking Tuesday (docket 23R-0577T). The proceeding follows a more extensive 911 rulemaking in docket 22R-0122T, in which the PUC adopted rules for BES outages, the commission said. Since then, staff noticed that the state’s only BES provider, Lumen’s CenturyLink, construes what qualifies as a BES outage “differently than intended,” it said. “On numerous occasions, CenturyLink has argued in outage investigation responses that outages in facilities that service customers other than Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) are originating service provider (OSP) outages, not BES outages, even if those outages also impact a PSAP and prevent the PSAP from being able to receive calls. CenturyLink has also argued … that if the company reroutes 9-1-1 calls to another, alternate PSAP, then no outage has occurred, since the calls are still being answered, even if they are not being answered by the PSAP originally intended to receive the call.” The disagreement affects other rules including on outage reporting and billing credits, the PUC said. The commission hopes that the fresh rulemaking will “remove any potential ambiguity contained in the relevant rules prior to taking any enforcement action,” it said. Comments are due Jan. 10, with replies due Jan. 19. Also, the PUC plans a virtual hearing Jan. 29 at 11:30 a.m. MST.

A proposal to split the District of Columbia’s unified 911 system could advance in the D.C. Council despite opposition from D.C. Fire and Emergency Services (DCFEMS), said sponsor Brianne Nadeau (D) in an interview Friday. Nadeau was to introduce her bill Friday evening with fellow Democrats Zachary Parker, Janeese George, Trayon White and Robert White, a Nadeau spokesperson said.

The House Communications Subcommittee plans a Nov. 30 FCC oversight hearing that will scrutinize President Joe Biden’s “Broadband Takeover,” the Commerce Committee said Tuesday. The announcement's tone likely presages a major focus on the FCC’s pursuit of a new net neutrality rulemaking that largely mirrors the commission’s rescinded 2015 rules and a reclassification of broadband as a Communications Act Title II service (see 2310190020), lobbyists told us. Meanwhile, two senior House Commerce members -- Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Bill Johnson, R-Ohio -- announced they’re not seeking reelection in 2024.