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FCC Issues Report on April 911 Outage

October 23, 2014

911 service are one of those things that people expect to be there when they need it. An outage in April of this year knocked out 911 service to 11 million people, and the Federal Communications Commission has released a damning report, according to Threatpost.


The incident affected 3.5 percent of the population of the U.S. The problem was due to a failure of a data center in Englewood, CO owned by Intrado, an emergency communications service provider. The company found that 6,410 were made to emergency call centers in the early morning hours of April 10, but only 792 of them went through. Fortunately, there were no deaths related to the outage, but it could have been a lot worse.

Intrado said that most of these calls were from, Washington State North Carolina and Minnesota. The FCC also found failed calls from California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.

The problem was apparently due to a failure in the company’s legacy call trunk routing system. Intrado handles calls for 911 centers across the country. An inadequate alarm system failed to alert technicians that there was a serious problem, prolonging the outage.

While hosted and outsourced call center solutions are becoming more popular, the outage might give people pause before they try to do the same thing for critical infrastructure like 911.

While this consolidation lowered the cost of 911 operations for the [local exchange carrier], the outage clearly showed that consolidation can result in too much dependence on a few critical elements if providers do not ensure the effective operation of adequate diversity and redundancy in the design and execution of the network,” the FCC wrote in its report.

While it may have been fashionable to gripe about the old Bell System network, one thing that they got right was the “Ma Bell’s” focus on reliability. This is a lesson a lot of smaller carriers and providers will need to appreciate as they transition to VoIP and hosted solutions.

“The April 2014 multistate outage was far more than a simple software error on an otherwise uneventful spring evening in Englewood, Colorado. It was a vivid example of the vulnerabilities that IP-supported architectures may present, without sufficient network safeguards and clear lines of accountability,” the FCC wrote. “The issues raised in the outage go to the heart of providing reliable 911 service. Regardless of what party implements a particular component of 911 service, there must be network reliability and clear accountability from call placement to call completion.”




Edited by Maurice Nagle



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