Comtech's planned buy of Solacom Technologies strengthens its next-generation 911 position, Noble Capital Markets analyst Joe Gomes wrote investors Wednesday. The $33 million buy of the NG-911 solutions provider is expected to close in fiscal Q1 ending April 30, subject to customary closing conditions, Comtech said Tuesday.
Disappointed by CenturyLink’s multistate outage last month, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) asked residents Tuesday to email his office about how disruptions to 911 affected them. “We want to know exactly how CenturyLink’s failure impacted the people of our state,” Ferguson said Tuesday. The Dec. 27-28 outage was the second lengthy statewide outage of CenturyLink’s 911 system since 2014, his office said. The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission is among state commissions making inquiries (see 1901030011). The carrier has said it would cooperate with policymakers. It didn’t comment Tuesday.
With advocates pushing different N11 options for a nationwide, three-digit number for suicide prevention and mental health crises calls (see 1812110033), there may not be consensus or compromise. Some told us that the FCC may ultimately have to choose. Some may lobby Congress, where legislators are monitoring the situation.
Arizona and Iowa commissions said they're looking into the multistate CenturyLink outage that disrupted 911, joining other states making inquiries (see 1901020022) and the FCC (see 1812280033). The Arizona Corporation Commission Utilities Division opened a docket (T-01051B-19-0001) Wednesday. "Staff believes this is a public health and safety issue that should be taken seriously and addressed in a expeditious manner," said Utilities Division Director Elijah Abinah in a Wednesday letter to the company. State law requires telecom companies to notify the commission about outages, but staff isn't aware of any notification from CenturyLink -- the agency found out from a news report, he said. Abinah asked the company to detail the cause and extent of the outage and what actions CenturyLink plans to prevent future outages. The Iowa Utilities Board “is aware of the outage and is looking into the impact to Iowa customers,” its spokesperson said. The telco said it's in touch with policymakers and will cooperate with any investigation; it didn't comment further Thursday.
The FCC plans to vote on an order to drive down Connect America Fund Phase I support in price-cap telco areas where CAF Phase II auction winners will receive support and in the areas that weren't eligible for the auction, said the tentative agenda for the Jan. 30 commissioners' meeting. Commissioners will consider a caller-ID spoofing NPRM, an IP captioned telephone service (IP CTS) order and Further NPRM, an NPRM proposing changes to the rules on applications for noncommercial education stations and low-power FM stations, and a media modernization order to eliminate requirements for broadcaster midterm equal employment opportunity reports.
States are looking into the CenturyLink outage that disrupted 911 systems across the country, with more formal investigations possible, said utility commissions we surveyed Wednesday. State-level probes are important and complement the federal probe announced last week by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (see 1812280033), said NARUC and the National Association of State 911 Administrators (NASNA).
The Vermont Public Utility Commission chose not to investigate E-911 reliability including operation and management of 911 and possible state backup power requirements for wireless and VoIP systems. In a Friday order (login required) the PUC dismissed a petition in docket 8842 by Charles Larkin and Stephen Whitaker, telecom and IT professionals who designed, engineered and implemented the state’s E-911 system (see 1611250019 and 1702240027). “Issues specific to the E911 system that are not a result of problems with the underlying telecommunications service are the jurisdiction of the E911 Board,” the PUC said. Some other raised issues that are within PUC jurisdiction “have been resolved in other Commission proceedings,” the agency said. It’s premature to address backup power for VoIP because the state jurisdiction over VoIP remains unresolved (see 1812140022), and the petition’s question about wireless backup power was specific to a network that’s no longer operational, it said.
The FCC will investigate the nationwide CenturyLink outage that disrupted 911 service for many Americans, Chairman Ajit Pai said Friday. At our deadline, the carrier was still working to resolve the multistate outage that began Thursday (see 1812270050). The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) said the outage shows urgent need to fully deploy next-generation 911. NARUC and state consumer advocates applauded FCC action.
Text-to-911 adoption is growing, but more work lies ahead, with many state-and-territory deployments not stretching across the entire jurisdiction, emergency number officials told us last week. “We’re absolutely headed in the right direction,” but funding is necessary as well as "many, many 911 centers" and "we need to try to accelerate that,” said NG-911 Institute Executive Director Patrick Halley in an interview. Ahead of most, Maine and Massachusetts completed statewide text-to-911 rollouts this month.
The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau sought comment on General Motors' request for partial waiver of minimum functionality requirements for real-time text services. “GM states that it intends to provide an RTT chat application to achieve accessibility for the customer support function” of its autonomous-vehicle ride-hailing service current in development, the bureau said Wednesday. Because its app would be designed to be used only to contact customer support, it shouldn’t have to support minimum functionalities, including RTT-RTT interoperability, transmission and receipt of RTT communications to and from any 911 call center, and simultaneous voice and text communications, GM argues, the bureau said. Comments are due Jan. 25, replies Feb. 11 in docket 15-178.