FCC: TDM-to-IP Transition Was a Cause of 911 Outage Affecting Seven States

The transition to next-generation 911 (NG911) emergency services based on IP played a role in the April outage that prevented people in seven states from being able to reach emergency dispatchers, said Rear Admiral David Simpson, chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. He also noted an increase in what he called “sunny day” 911 outages that occur for “purely technical reasons” unrelated to weather or other external events. He said there were three other major “sunny day” outages in 2014 in addition to the April outage, but there were no such outages in 2013 or for earlier years. Rear Admiral Simpson said all three of those other outages were related to NG911 implementation or the TDM-to-IP transition.

Michael Connelly, an attorney advisor to Public Safety and Homeland Security, offered six recommendations aimed at preventing this sort of situation from occurring again:

1. Development of a comprehensive set of best practices as the nation transitions to NG911
2. Conducting further investigation to maintain pace with evolving technologies and challenges
3. Closer coordination between government and commercial entities
4. All parties involved in end-to-end call completion should practice situational awareness during an outage
5. The FCC should establish reporting rules for the transition and should enforce those rules as necessary
6. The primary 911 provider should evaluate contractual relationships and establish mechanisms to maintain meaningful control over sub-contractors