AT&T, Lumen, Verizon, Intrado to Pay Over $6 Million in FCC Settlements for 911 Outages

AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Verizon and Intrado have agreed to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) settlements totaling more than $6 million for 911 network outages.

The FCC’s enforcement bureau has settled five investigations into the communications providers’ compliance with the agency’s 911 reliability rules during network outages that occurred last year. To resolve the matters, each company has agreed to the FCC settlement payments.

Moreover, they agreed to implement a compliance plan to ensure adherence to these 911 rules.

FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel

Jessica Rosenworcel is FCC chairwoman.

“The most important phone call you ever make may be a call to 911,” she said. “Sunny day outages can be especially troubling because they occur when the public and 911 call centers least expect it. It’s vital that phone companies prevent these outages wherever possible, and provide prompt and sufficient notification to 911 call centers when they do occur.”

FCC Settlements

CenturyLink (now Lumen) will pay a $3.8 million settlement. That resolves an investigation into whether it violated FCC rules in connection with the failure to transmit 911 calls and timely notify 911 call centers during an outage on September 28, 2020.

AT&T will pay a total of $460,000 to settle two investigations. First, a $160,000 settlement resolves an investigation into whether AT&T violated FCC rules in connection with failed 911 calls and the failure to timely notify potentially affected 911 call centers during a 911 outage also on September 28, 2020. The second is for a separate outage that also occurred on the same day. AT&T will pay a $300,000 settlement, which will resolve an investigation into whether it violated FCC rules in connection with failed 911 calls, and failure to deliver number and location information.

Intrado will pay a $1.75 million settlement. That resolves an investigation into whether it violated FCC rules in connection with an outage that affected the delivery of 911 calls on September 28, 2020, and to timely notify 911 call centers regarding the outage.

Finally, Verizon will pay a $274,000 settlement to resolve an investigation into whether it violated FCC rules in connection with failed 911 calls during an outage on May 7, 2020.