AT&T Mobility must pay a $5.25 million fine to the FCC and adhere to a compliance plan designed help ensure that 911 calls are completed as part of a settlement to close the investigation into two 911 outages that the agency described as “preventable” and “unacceptable,” the FCC announced June 29.

The settlement addresses two 911 service outages that impacted AT&T’s voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) network last year—a five-hour outage on March 8, 2017, and a 47-minute outage on May 1, 2017, that resulted in more than 15,000 failed 911 calls, according to the FCC consent decree outlining the settlement terms.

“Both of these ‘sunny day’ outages resulted from planned network changes that inadvertently interfered with the routing of 911 calls by AT&T Mobility,” according to the FCC consent decree.

“Together, the outages knocked out 911 service for almost six hours to millions of AT&T customers across the nation on its VoLTE network. With respect to the March 8, 2017, outage, AT&T Mobility and its subcontractors attempted to notify all affected public-safety answering points (“PSAPs”) through a variety of means, but this process took four-and-a-half hours to complete, and some PSAPs characterized the notifications as unclear or incomplete or stated they received no notification at all.”  Read entire article here: http://urgentcomm.com/regulation/att-must-pay-fcc-525-million-implement-changes-settlement-over-two-911-outages-last-year