A Colo. highway contractor severed a Qwest fiber cable, cutting phone, 911, video and Internet service to thousands of Colo. residents and businesses in Trinidad, the San Luis Valley and Walsenburg. The contractor was working on an I-25 freeway exit project near Pueblo. Service was out for about 5 hours Wed. afternoon. Public safety officials said the outage took out 911 service across the affected area, but there were no reports of life-threatening incidents during the outage.

The FCC shouldn’t penalize Alltel for missing a Dec. 31 deadline for 95% of its customers to use location-capable handsets, the company told the Commission. Alltel cited reports that it and U.S. Cellular had been singled out for referral to the Enforcement Bureau. “Alltel has taken its E- 911 obligations seriously and has made concrete and timely efforts to comply,” the carrier said: “It met or exceeded every interim handset benchmark and is on a clear path to full compliance; its marketing and education campaigns to encourage subscribers to replace noncompliant handsets began well in advance of the Dec. 31, 2005 deadline; and its current penetration rate is due to the resistant nature of Alltel’s customer base - a matter beyond Alltel’s control.”

VoIP is the main bar to sustainable avenues to financing wireline E-911 service, said a Mass. study panel analyzing E- 911 funding mechanisms. The Mass. Statewide Energy & Telecom Board is studying ways to implement a 2002 law for an interim 911 funding fix giving the Dept. of Telecom & Energy until Dec. 31, 2006, to find a long-term funding solution. VoIP customers don’t contribute financially to E-911, the board said. Migration of phone customers to VoIP and wireless is choking off the landline revenue stream that supports E-911 service, the report said, adding that wireless customers do contribute via the state wireless E-911 fund, but those who migrate to VoIP no longer support E-911 service. The board urged a central E-911 fund supported by surcharges on any device that can access E-911 by landline, wireless or the Internet. Regulators should expand the E-911 fund mission to cover 911 dispatcher training, implementation of 311 for non- emergency public safety calls and 211 for human services referrals and “reverse 911” to warn people in neighborhoods in the path of storms and other dangers, the report said.

The House E-911 Caucus wants $42 million in FY 07 to help state and local govt. upgrade 911 infrastructure, the Caucus said in letters to the chairmen and ranking members of the House Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee and Commerce State Justice Subcommittee. The funds would be split between the 2 committees. Full funding would be $250 million annually, but the $42 million will be an “amount adequate to ensure the launch,” the letter said. A first step would be creating a new office jointly run by the NTIA dir. and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Qwest and Polk County, Ia., agreed to a $50,000 settlement of a 911 lawsuit brought by the family of an Ankeny, Ia., man, Scott Mein, who died in 2003 of a heart attack after paramedics mistakenly were sent to the wrong address. Qwest and the county will each contribute $25,000. The county argued in court last year that state law protected 911 dispatchers from liability when mistakes don’t constitute willful neglect. And Qwest argued on the same basis that federal law exempted it from liability even though its 911 database supplied the erroneous information. The error caused a response delay of about 8 min. All parties decided to settle rather than fight over unclear liability. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said it later revised its dispatching policies to minimize chances of another mistake.

Communications networks taken down in Hurricane Katrina didn’t succumb to wind and rain but floods and power outages, according to the FCC’s Hurricane Katrina Independent Panel. The body, poised to summarize its 5 months of work in a report due June 15, will tell the Commission a commonly heard analysis: That things really weren’t that bad -- until the levees broke.

A mishap in a routine AT&T network software upgrade hurt 911 service on about 9,000 Houston phone lines for hours early Mon., also impairing phone service to Houston’s Methodist Hospital and Texas Medical Center. People calling 911 got a busy signal on the first attempt or were rerouted to another 911 system outside the city. Local 7-digit emergency numbers worked normally. Hospital officials reported problems with incoming and outgoing calls not going through, but care wasn’t affected thanks to backup via cellphones and satellite phones, they said. Service was back to normal by lunchtime Mon.

Advocates for the hearing impaired attacked a National Exchange Carrier Assn. (NECA) proposal to cut reimbursement rates for several relay services. In its May 1 FCC filing, NECA proposed lower reimbursement for traditional Telecom Relay Service (TRS), Speech-to-Speech service, Video Relay Service (VRS) and Internet Protocol Relay Service. NECA, the TRS fund administrator, said it based the proposed reductions on “cost and demand projections received from providers of relay services.” Revised data collection forms were sent to providers in the fall at the FCC’s instruction, NECA said. Due to changes in relay service technology, data now are collected from providers based on types of TRS services, not costs at each TRS center. The new forms also allow providers to report capital investment costs for the first time. In a letter to the FCC, advocacy groups said the FCC should reject the rates because NECA didn’t “factor in the access and functional equivalence requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).” The letter was signed by the National Assn. of the Deaf, Deaf & Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network and the Cal. Coalition of Agencies Serving the Deaf & Hard of Hearing. To comply with ADA, rates should reflect the need for interoperability of devices used by the deaf, “speed of answer requirements,” recruiting and training interpreters, providing equivalent 911 access, and other factors, the groups said. VRS provider Sorenson Communications also urged the FCC to reject reimbursement rate cuts, saying the VRS rate would be “inadequate to make VRS service available for the entire deaf community.” Sorenson said that “rather than increasing the rate to reflect the forecasted increase in costs coinciding with new federal requirements, NECA has recommended a considerable rate reduction aimed at eliminating costs such as outreach, which have been accepted in previous years.”

Congress should use “a light regulatory touch” in revising the Telecom Act, FCC Comr. Tate told the Tenn. Telecom Assn. in a videotape presentation Tues. at its Spring Business Meeting in Nashville. “The government needs to be a referee in the communications industry” but it shouldn’t be “a coach, telling everyone how to play the game,” Tate told the group. “A light regulatory touch promotes investment and encourages competition,” she said: “I believe in regulatory humility.” She said an NTIA study found that investment grew because the FCC loosened regulation through the Triennial Review Order. The TRO “resulted in more than $6 billion in investment by Verizon and $5 billion in investment by AT&T,” she said: “That’s $11 billion by just 2 companies.” Tate said a new Telecom Act should go beyond promoting deployment of broadband and also encourage subscribing: “It does no good to have broadband deployed to every home in the country if no one is going to subscribe to it.” A new Telecom Act also should “recognize that as technologies change, consumers are still going to demand that the telecommunications industry provide the same level of service in terms of public safety that we have all come to expect,” she said. She said that means consumers “will be counting on 911 to be able to locate them if they call for help [and] will be counting on the FBI to execute wiretaps when a court authorizes them to.” Consumers also “will be counting on their burglar alarm alerting the call center when their house is broken into,” she said. Congress and the FCC should “make sure the transition to new technologies doesn’t undermine services that people rely on for their safety and security.”

The response systems criticized in last week’s Senate Katrina report are already changing, according to sources around the Hill. The report of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, broadly critical of the govt.’s handling of the hurricane, said “systems on which officials relied on to support their response efforts failed,” preventing proper federal-state coordination of first responders and relief efforts. In some cases, the report said, PSAPs went down completely without routing calls to a new call center.