The FCC Public Safety Bureau report on June’s derecho wind storm, which knocked out phone service for 3.6 million people in the mid-Atlantic and beyond -- many unable to reach 911 for several hours -- made demands of telcos among its recommendations. The Public Safety Bureau released the 56-page document Thursday after starting an investigation in July (CD July 20 p5). Four 911 centers in northern Virginia lost 911 access completely, prompting a close look at Verizon’s role and backup power generator failures there. FCC recommendations include provisions on backup power and audits and preface a rulemaking notice intended to strengthen emergency communications.

Colorado has adopted “a pretty arbitrary method” of determining high-cost support for telcos, said Pete Kirchhof, executive vice president of the Colorado Telecommunications Association (CTA), which represents 25 small companies. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission adopted a new set of telecom rules last Monday after months of deliberation (CD Dec 18 p9). They've already provoked concern from CenturyLink, smaller telcos and a 911 authority. The order, effective this Monday, will kill retail regulation in regions deemed effectively competitive, cap the state’s high-cost USF and assert that Internet Protocol-enabled service falls outside the PUC’s jurisdiction except in emergency communications. The order is “what we feared, to be honest,” Kirchhof told us, citing telcos’ worries about lower levels of support and burdensome processes of appealing effective competition rulings.

The FCC made the right decision Wednesday in approving a text-to-911 further rulemaking notice (CD Dec 13 p12), said groups representing the deaf and hearing impaired, in a letter to the commission released Thursday. “We stand ready to work with the FCC, industry, and public safety trade associations to meet the timelines in deployment, outreach and education, research and development, and regulatory enforcement toward achieving the promise and potential of text-to-911 emergency calling capabilities for all Americans,” the letter said. “We fully expect this process to be contributing significantly toward activation of fully accessible emergency communications capability via text, video, and/or voice as part of the Next Generation 9-1-1 initiative within the next ten years.” The groups that signed include Telecommunications for the Deaf & Hard of Hearing, National Association of the Deaf and Association of Late-Deafened Adults.

The Maine Public Utilities Commission praised the FCC’s recent push on text-to-911 (CD Dec 13 p12) as a key interim measure as Maine prepares to launch an NG-911 network in 2013. It’s important for “wireless subscribers who currently use text messaging as their primary means of everyday communications, such as those with a hearing or speech disability,” said Chairman Tom Welch in a statement Thursday (http://xrl.us/bn6bxn). “Increasingly this population is abandoning the use of TTYs for newer technologies such as text messaging that allow them more flexibility to communicate with most others except 9-1-1.” It’s also “valuable in situations where a 9-1-1 call may endanger a caller or when voice networks are congested,” he said.

Maine gave FairPoint its $32 million E911 contract, the telco said Thursday (http://xrl.us/bn46zi). FairPoint will supply and maintain the system for the state’s 26 911 centers, making Maine “one of the first states in the nation to deploy a Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG 9-1-1) system compliant with the National Emergency Number Association standards,” said FairPoint. The system will “link voice, data and video elements to E9-1-1 call facilities,” “transfer data seamlessly” and “provide the capability to read text messages and view video when the industry standards are developed,” said Vice President Karen Romano in a statement.

T-Mobile USA will begin offering Apple products on its network in 2013, Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann said Thursday at a webcast conference in Germany. T-Mobile CEO John Legere implied in a separate presentation during the conference that the products T-Mobile offers will include the iPhone, but did not say what other devices it might make available. “When we do announce what we're going to deploy, it will clearly be better and more effective” than recent media reports have suggested, he said. A T-Mobile spokesman said additional information on T-Mobile’s Apple offerings would be available later. An Apple spokesman confirmed that T-Mobile would begin carrying the company’s products next year, but declined to discuss specific models.

The FCC will hold field hearings to scrutinize communications resiliency in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Chairman Julius Genachowski announced. The storm hit the East Coast starting Oct. 29 and knocked out a quarter of the cell sites in affected areas, with outages lingering long after. The hearings will begin in early 2013, starting in New York, and focus on access to 911, how resources are shared, emergency permitting and dependency on electric power and fuel, the FCC said. The agency will look at wired and wireless resiliency and produce recommendations for a stronger network, it said. Questions of new technology and jurisdictional tension remain concerns, officials told us.

Hawaii’s Enhanced 911 Board asked the FCC to “take affirmative action that will enable the deployment of text-to-9-1-1,” Chairman Clayton Tom and Executive Director Thera Bradshaw said in a filing. The Hawaii Enhanced 911 board supports FCC efforts to impose text-to-911, they wrote. “We encourage the Commission’s action as soon as possible to ensure at least the basic requirement that wireless carriers deliver 9-1-1 text messages to Public Safety Answering Points that are ready and willing to accept texting.” The board said it also wants the FCC to require the use of a “bounce back” message that would alert the sender “that they need to make a 9-1-1 voice call when a text cannot be delivered to a PSAP.” While the board knows additional compliance deadlines and other rules for text-to-911 need to be considered in a further notice of proposed rulemaking, “we encourage the Commission not to delay the first step and to adopt basic requirements now,” Tom and Bradshaw said (http://xrl.us/bnzuec).

A 911 task force identified the “vulnerability of newer technologies” in a preliminary report about Verizon 911 failures during the June 29 mid-Atlantic derecho wind storm. Traditional hard-wired connections meant power loss didn’t result in loss of a dial tone or service, it said. The report named VoIP and standard Internet Protocol as two very different technologies that, when the power’s out, lose “access to 9-1-1 once the back-up battery contained within the equipment, drains,” the 911 directors said. Cellphones also encounter problems due to network congestion and the possibility of physical damage to cell sites, the report said.

The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials pressed the FCC in a meeting with David Furth, deputy chief of the Public Safety Bureau, to move forward “as soon as possible” on a “basic requirement” that wireless carriers be able to deliver emergency texts to 911 call centers. “We have ... been encouraged by recent successful trials of text-to-9-1-1 capability utilizing existing texting technology,” said an ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bnv67i). The order should require that “there be a ‘bounce back’ message informing the sender to make a 9-1-1 voice call when a text cannot be delivered,” APCO said. “APCO International understands that compliance deadlines and other implementation rules related to the order will need to be considered in a further notice of proposed rulemaking. However, deferring action on the basic requirement would only lead to uncertainty and delay serious consideration of implementation issues and requirements."