Pay Up, T-Mobile

The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau reached a $17.5 million settlement with T-Mobile, resolving an investigation into two 911 service outages that occurred on the company’s network last year. The outages lasted approximately three hours, and prevented T-Mobile customers from reaching first responders when making 911 calls from wireless devices. In addition to the $17.5 million, T-Mobile agreed to strengthen its 911 service procedures and to adopt robust compliance measures to ensure that it adheres to the FCC’s 911 service reliability and outage notification rules in the future, according to the FCC. “The Commission has no higher priority than ensuring the reliability and resilience of our nation’s communications networks so that consumers can reach public safety in their time of need,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “Communications providers that do not take necessary steps to ensure that Americans can call 911 will be held to account.” The Commission explained that T-Mobile’s network suffered two 911 outages on August 8, 2014. The outages together lasted approximately three hours. On average, nearly 27,400 calls per hour are placed to 911 nationwide for all providers. Both T-Mobile outages were nationwide outages, affecting almost all of T-Mobile’s then 50 million customers. Simply put, a T-Mobile customer dialing 911 during these outages would not have reached first responders. (FCC)