Oh no! Not a million dollars! I what ever will they do?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined Verizon a little over a million dollars for failing to route 911 calls during a cellular outage.
The outage occurred on December 21, 2022, killing calls to Verizon’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) operations in six southeastern states for an hour and 44 minutes.
The FCC says this mistake should have been caught before the outage happened, but claims Verizon employees weren’t enforcing proper oversight like they were supposed to be doing.
The plan details several practices that Verizon should ideally have already implemented, such as providing a checklist for employees to follow, testing proposed network changes before they’re applied, and of course removing buggy security policies when they’re discovered.
“Ensuring ultra-reliable connectivity, especially when callers need to reach emergency services, is a cornerstone of our company,” Verizon told The Register.
We understand the critical importance of maintaining a robust and reliable 911 network, and we’re committed to ensuring that our customers can always rely on our services in times of need."
The original article contains 502 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Verizon, “Stop, it tickles!”
Why can’t all cell providers have an agreement where if the user dials 911 or whatever the equivalent is in their country your phone will connect to any network if your provider isn’t currently available and route the call.
Being restricted to only your network when another provider might have a cell tower nearby with full signal is ridiculous in an emergency.
Verizon is probably the provider for the 911 dispatch center. So calls will be carried by the network and Verizon trips them at the door.
As I understand it…That’s exactly how mobile phones work when you dial emergency number. if your operator has no signal, it automatically selects the strongest cell signal and attempts it through that. And you don’t even have to know the country equivalent number, dialing 911 will automatically route to the local emergency center. There’s a list of numbers that are recognized as emergency numbers by the phone/sim, but the actual number is not even used when the call is initiated. In general as long as you have a phone with battery left, you should be able to make a call to emergency center.
Repeat after me “Fines need to be tied to global revenue”. It has to hurt, if you want companies to stop.
