New York City awarded Verizon a 7-year, $195 million contract to upgrade citywide E-911 service with state-of-the- art technology. The city can extend the contract 2 years. Verizon will install a new fiber network with all-new switches, routers, Centrex voice and an Ethernet dedicated data network for police, fire and emergency medical units. The contract includes continuous Verizon network monitoring and tech support. The first phase is to be completed this year, with city 911 operations to move to the new network before 2009. Verizon and its corporate ancestors have provided the city’s 911 network since 1968.
Md. Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) signed a bill denying the PSC jurisdiction over VoIP services except in 3 limited areas. SB-864/HB-1379 leaves the PSC with authority over VoIP 911 service, access charges and other intercarrier compensation, and Lifeline service. But the PSC won’t have authority over VoIP market entry, rates or terms.
House Homeland Security Committee Chmn. Thompson (D- Miss.) had a firm message Tues. for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Undersecy. David Paulison: Finish a plan coordinating local, state and federal emergency response efforts and end bureaucratic turf skirmishes. Paulison irked Thompson when he said the plan, due June 1, won’t be ready until close to July 1. Ranking Member King (R-N.Y.) pressed Paulison about a current International Trade Commission case that could affect first responders’ access to cellphones.
A network failure Mon. knocked out landline E-911 service for about 4,000 Verizon customers in eastern Washington County, Pa. Customers in Bentleyville, Ellsworth, Somerset and Fallowfield lost E-911 Mon. evening, as efforts to find and repair the network fault slowed because Verizon’s E-911 service rides partly on trunks leased from FairPoint Communications, according to the county’s public safety dir., Jeffrey Yates. Callers to 911 got a fast busy signal. The failure didn’t affect cellular E-911 nor emergency responders’ local 7-digit numbers. Neither were regular phone services affected. Verizon and FairPoint technicians rigged temporary circuits, restoring E-911 across most affected areas by Tues. morning, officials said, but it was unclear when the cause would be found and repaired. The county is in western Pa., south of Pittsburgh.
Reporting to the Pa. PUC on an April 9 York County E-911 outage, Verizon blamed an improbable combination of equipment failure and human error. Hardware failures in primary and automatic backup routers providing York County’s E-911 caused the 6:30-9 p.m. outage. But the report also said Verizon Business, which runs the system, didn’t properly monitor its network. Verizon said that 2 days before the outage, a card in the automatic backup router began failing intermittently - - a problem undetected until a similar card in the primary router failed completely. The backup router’s faulty card couldn’t carry the load, failing immediately and leaving no path for the 911 calls, the report said. An effort to manually reroute traffic to a 2nd backup circuit failed. That circuit was out of service temporarily in preparation for reverse 911, in which central dispatchers use the phone network to warn of dangers. The flaw was fixed when workers drove to the failed primary router and swapped out the bad card. They then replaced the bad card in the automatic backup router, reviving the system. Verizon Communications said that if the failing card in the backup router had been caught promptly, it would have been ready to take the traffic when the primary router failed. But the intermittently failing backup card wasn’t noted because Verizon was in the midst of shifting Pa. network monitoring from Dallas to Pittsburgh when the failures occurred. The monitoring “could have been done better,” Verizon said. It has moved to ensure that the sequence doesn’t recur, it said. The company tested all equipment in the system, made sure alarm systems will alert it to problems, revised monitoring methods to ensure someone is monitoring network alarms at all times, even during moves and changes, and trained staff in rerouting.
Communications services pay twice as much in taxes and fees as makers of clothing, sporting goods and other products, Heartland Institute said. Taxes and fees on cable and phone service in 59 U.S. cities cost households about $20.51 a month on average, the study said. The Chicago-based group studied cable franchise and PEG access fees, the Universal Service Fund fee, state 911 taxes and the like, it said. The burden varied by state, ranging from $10.93 in Lansing, Mich., ,to $34.27 in Jacksonville, Fla., Heartland Institute said. Taxes and fees also vary by service type, the study said. A typical wireline call is taxed at 17.23%; a wireless call, billed at the same rate, is taxed at 11.78%. The group urged govt. at all levels to cut and harmonize fees and taxes. It supports statewide video franchising. The nonprofit research group is not affiliated with any “political party, business or foundation,” it said. An official there said companies and industry groups don’t contract for the Institute’s studies.
A draft E-911 bill by Rep. Gordon (D-Tenn.) would offer VoIP providers protection from suits if emergency calls aren’t connected to public safety answering points (PSAPs), Gordon’s legislative asst., Dana Lichtenberg, said at an FCBA lunch Fri. The immunity provision is a key element in the bill, circulating among House Commerce Committee lawmakers and expected to be introduced within 2 weeks, she said. The bill updates one debated last year and resembles S-428, which the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously reported out April 25.
The National Emergency Number Assn. and the Assn. of Public-Safety Communications Officials will cooperate on next generation 911 (NG911) planning and deployment, they said Wed. The agreement covers how they will share information and their areas of overlap and expertise. Each will have a committee -- NENA’s Next Generation Transition Planning Committee and APCO’s Project 41 Committee -- with each body’s leadership also serving on the other panel. The arrangement is a “major step forward… on the critical issue of NG911,” said NENA Pres. Jason Barbour. “The results will be a firm foundation for the advancement of 911 and public safety,” APCO Pres. Wanda McCarley said.
Vonage can provide E-911 service to 95.6% of its customers, the VoIP provider told the FCC in a Mon. report. Most of the rest get basic 911, Vonage said.
The Nev. House passed a bill that would end state rate regulation of all retail phone services besides basic exchange from Embarq and AT&T, the state’s largest incumbent telcos. The companies are under price cap regulation. Other incumbents, which are under rate-of-return regulation, could petition for deregulation if they met competition tests. AB- 518 would keep basic exchange under nonindexed caps until 2012. The bill was amended to require each incumbent local exchange carrier to report annually on competition in its territory; to set procedures by which an incumbent could be released from its duty to be the provider of last resort; and to prohibit deregulation of 911 service.