None of the public safety answering points in...
None of the public safety answering points in Washington state’s largest county was notified by CenturyLink or its vendor, Intrado, that there was a problem during the April 9 and 10 911 outage, commented King County’s E-911 Program Office in…
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(http://bit.ly/1nPAgBZ) FCC docket 14-72. Comments were posted there Tuesday. The PSAPs were informed of the outage by the public reporting that 911 calls did not go through or by noticing a reduction in call volume, the county said. The CenturyLink 911 repair center was “quickly overloaded” and the majority of calls from PSAPs went unanswered or were put on hold for extended periods, it said. Neither CenturyLink nor Intrado provided instructions to PSAPs on what could be done to mitigate the outage, leaving PSAPs “on their own to try to figure out how to provide some level of service to the public,” said the county. The outage was due to a “technical problem in third-party vendor equipment” and was “not caused by any failures or malfunctions of CenturyLink’s network,” commented the telco (http://bit.ly/1pIGaYT). “Once the third party vendor identified and corrected this technical problem, 911 service was immediately restored ... CenturyLink is fully committed to providing its customers reliable communications services, particularly 911 service, and understands how vital robust communications services are to the public.” The Telecommunications Industry Association supports FCC efforts to ensure 911 networks are “reliable and resilient,” but the FCC should “refrain from taking regulatory action,” TIA commented (http://bit.ly/1qsz0b3). The FCC should “encourage and allow network operators and vendors to continue their voluntary efforts in improving the reliability of their networks,” TIA said. The FCC Public Safety Bureau began an investigation into the outage May 19 (CD May 20 p18). The six-hour outage also affected large areas of Oregon and portions of California, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, the bureau said. The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission has also opened a state investigation. A CenturyLink spokeswoman had no additional comment beyond its filing. An Intrado spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment.