WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) — The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has announced its Enforcement Bureau has reached a $2.4 million settlement with General Communications Inc. (GCI) that resolves allegations of five 911 service outages occurring on the company's wireless network in Alaska over the last eight years.
The alleged service outages stopped consumers from being able to reach first responders in times of need. The FCC charged these outages could have been minimized or avoided entirely if GCI had implemented appropriate safeguards to its 911 network architecture and operational procedures.
"Americans should be able to reach 911 at any time, whether they live in New York City or a village in Alaska," said Travis LeBlanc, chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau. "We will continue to work with service providers across the nation to ensure they meet this critical expectation to protect the public's safety."
Under the terms of the settlement, GCI will pay a $2.4 million fine and develop a compliance program drafted to strengthen its 911 resilience and 911 risk management processes. This program will help GCI identify 911 service disruption risks, protect against these risks, detect future 911 outages and recover in a timely manner from any outages that occur.