Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission staff and CenturyLink have entered into a settlement agreement under which CenturyLink, Inc., agrees to pay more than $2.8 million in fines to resolve a staff complaint brought against the company following the April 2014 multi-state 911 service outage. The settlement is signed by two of the three parties to the proceeding — UTC staff and CenturyLink. The public counsel unit of the state attorney general’s office did not sign the agreement and said it intends to oppose the settlement.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement provided to TRDaliy today that the agreement doesn’t reflect the severity of the incident. “The CenturyLink outage left the entire state without 911 services for six hours between April 9-10, 2014,” AG Ferguson said. “We oppose this settlement because it doesn’t reflect the severity of potential harm to Washington residents due to loss of this critical service.”
The April 9 and 10 incident disrupted 911 service for six hours and all 6.9 million people in the state of Washington lost 911 service during that time. The outage, which was found to be caused by a software coding error in CenturyLink’s 911 vendor, Intrado, Inc.’s Englewood, Co. Emergency Communications Management Center (ECMC), affected a total of 11 million people and 81 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in seven states.
The FCC investigated the outage and released a report in October (10/17/14). The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau subsequently imposed a fine of $16 million on CenturyLink — the largest ever imposed by the Commission related to 911 — and $1.4 million on Intrado to settle the FCC’s investigation into the 911 outage (04/06/15). UTC staff, meanwhile, filed a complaint against CenturyLink alleging that the company violated commission laws and rules related to the 911 outage and should be required to pay fine of $2.9 million and make improvements to prevent future outages (12/03/14). The amount of the fine was reduced from $2.9 million to $2.85 million based on a recalculation of the number of uncompleted calls.
CenturyLink admits to the rule violations in the settlement agreement. Staff had also recommended that CenturyLink be required to conduct certain technical upgrades to prevent another 911 outage in the future. The company should be required to make improvements to the 911 infrastructure and file several reports with the UTC regarding the corrective actions it has taken and any other upgrades to its 911 network, UTC staff said.
The settlement requires CenturyLink to submit quarterly reports on 911 circuit reliability and updates on the transition to next generation 911. Until all PSAPs in the state have completed the transition to NG 911, CenturyLink agrees to annually perform a “911 circuit diversity audit” and report the results to commission staff. Staff and CenturyLink will file testimony in support of the settlement next month and public counsel will have an opportunity to file responsive testimony in opposition to the settlement. (UTC Docket UT-140597) -Carrie DeLeon, carrie.deleon@wolterskluwer.com
Courtesy TR Daily