Verizon customers in eastern North Carolina suffered a 911 outage Tuesday after CenturyLink’s fiber was cut, said a state Department of Information Technology spokesperson. The outage started at about 4 a.m., she said. Tuesday afternoon, North Carolina 911 board staff was notified that CenturyLink replaced the cut fiber and service is fully restored, the department said. "Verizon has advised that all counties that had issues with wireless 911 calls now have full-service restoration." A vehicle accident damaged aerial fiber and temporarily disrupted 911 service Tuesday in Moore County, a CenturyLink spokesperson said. CenturyLink technicians rerouted 911 calls starting at 8:30 a.m. and have finished fiber repairs, she said. Verizon didn’t comment.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is traveling to Louisiana and Texas to speak at conferences for the National Association of Tower Erectors and NTCA, said a release Monday: Pai will visit a telemedicine program in New Orleans and a 911 call center, meet with healthcare officials, and “meet with business leaders to discuss 5G technology.”
NTIA announced preliminary funding allocations for the 911 grant program with $110 million for states, territories, tribal organizations and the District of Columbia to upgrade to next-generation 911. Complete applications for the three-year program are due April 2, said a Friday revision to a notice of funding opportunity by the Commerce and Transportation departments. Top allocations are to California ($10.5 million), Texas ($10.1 million), Florida ($5.8 million), Illinois ($4.9 million) and Pennsylvania ($4.5 million).
Prison officials are backing away from demands the FCC allow jamming of cell signals to curb contraband cellphones in prisons, said Kevin Kempf, executive director of the Association of State Correctional Administrators. Carriers and corrections officials have been meeting regularly for about a year and are close to finalizing a task force report, which will be filed at the FCC, Tuesday's FCBA event heard.
A Guam finding that the territory wrongly diverted about $3.9 million in 911 fee revenue to unrelated purposes got kudos Monday from FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. “This should allow necessary system improvements and upgrades,” including Guam’s reported inability to record 911 calls (see 1811270016), O’Rielly emailed us. “Hopefully, this will also provide impetus to the habitual diverting states of New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey to take corrective measures.” Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero (D), who recently began her first term, reportedly pledged last week to return the sum to the territory’s 911 fund. “We have to follow the law,” and 911 upgrades are coming, she told the Pacific Daily News, after the Public Utilities Commission’s Jan. 17 order finding four diversions of 911 funding for FY 2014-17 violated Guam law and ordering government return the funds within 120 days. Such funding was never intended for spending “other than those directly related to the operation and maintenance of the 911 system,” the PUC order said. States and territories diverted nearly 10 percent of $2.9 billion in 911 fee revenue for unrelated purposes in 2017, the FCC has found (see 1812190059).
AT&T's BellSouth asked the FCC to clarify aspects of non-VoIP calls, and prohibit state and local governments from requiring interconnected VoIP customers pay more in total 911 fees than comparable non-VoIP customers. The telco said it's involved in lawsuits where plaintiffs argue voice services not transmitted to end-user customers using IP technology can qualify as interconnected VoIP. It said nearly all cases trace back to one individual, and the companies he owns, hoping to profit from 911 charges due if his theories hold. The FCC should declare voice service that doesn't use IP to transmit voice communications over last-mile facilities to or from end-user customer premises "is never VoIP service, including interconnected VoIP service," BellSouth petitioned for declaratory ruling, posted Monday. It urged declaring "the location of the network demarcation in a particular building is not relevant to classifying a service as interconnected VoIP," and state and local governments be barred from "imposing higher 911 charges on interconnected VoIP service than on similar non-VoIP service."
Three coordinators of state and local 911 systems said they didn't get warning or immediate direct information from CenturyLink as a network outage last month disrupted such systems nationwide. Officials in Washington state, Colorado and Wyoming's state capital told us they relied on their own information, news reports and Twitter in the early stages as they decided how to respond to problems including static, loss of automatic location data and, in Washington state, hours-long 911 outages.
The full federal government got back to work Monday, after a prolonged partial shutdown that shuttered the FCC, FTC, NTIA and other agencies overseeing communications policy. Incoming FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will be sworn in Wednesday by Chairman Ajit Pai in an eighth-floor conference room and will participate in the commissioners’ meeting that follows, said industry officials. President Donald Trump signed off Friday on a continuing resolution to reopen the FCC and other shuttered agencies through Feb. 15, after the House passed the measure as expected (see 1901240016).
People can now text 911 in Nebraska's southeastern counties, the Southeast 911 Committee said Tuesday. The region includes Lincoln, Beatrice, Falls City, Jefferson County and 11 other Nebraska counties. Most of the state’s 93 counties still don’t have text-to-911, though 24 counties are implementing it, said a Nebraska Public Service Commission map. While text-to-911 adoption is growing across the U.S., many state-and-territory deployments don’t cover the entire jurisdiction (see 1812210046).
Possible violations of Minnesota law by Frontier Communications have state legislators’ attention, they told us. Comments are due early next month to the Public Utilities Commission on the state Commerce Department finding the carrier may be violating at least 35 laws and rules, based on about 1,000 customer comments (see 1901040039).