According to the AP, 911 service was knocked offline in Southern California. "An equipment problem knocked out long-distance telephone service and parts of the 911 system for tens of thousands of residential and business customers in several Southern California cities Tuesday, officials said.
(sarcasm alert) Gee, I wonder if the FCC will step in and force the traditional carriers to be in full 911 compliance with 7 nines of reliability (99.9999999%). Better yet, since the carriers did not inform their customers of any potential outage due to their lack of redundancy, I think the FCC should fine the carriers for this 911 outage and force the carriers to notify their customers that 911 may not work. I demand immediate action by the FCC to remedy this unacceptable 911 service!
After all, the FCC is forcing VoIP providers to notify their customers of their 911 limitations or else the VoIP providers must cut their service.
p.s. Maybe the Southern California carrier (Verizon) should check out Internet Telephony Expo (also in Southern California) next week for any 911 redundancy solutions? I'm sure with the inherent "nuclear proof" nature of IP packets (re-routable), there is probably an IP solution to help build 911 redundancy in legacy carrier networks.
911 service knocked offline
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(sarcasam alert) Isn't 99.9999999% is 9 nines of reliability?
Seriously though, we need to know when did the 911 system fail last and how long was the failure before we can conclude whether 7 9s objective (is that the real objective)? Also, the linked reference points out extra measures like patrols etc were taken to offset the failure.
Yeah, I got carried away with my 9's. I did say I was being sarcastic! : )
>>Isn't 99.9999999% is 9 nines of reliability?
"Isn't .. is"?
You mean:
Isn't 99.9999999% 9 nines of reliability?
; )
Couldn't one almost argue that the E-911 service which will be required of VoIP providers like Vonage may be more reliable because its stability will depend on the Internet? It will be interesting to see what sort of E-911 solutions they come up with.
In regards to the AP wire about the outage, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula said, "Local calls were possible but long distance service was interrupted", and I have to clarify that statement.
We are a California-based CLEC and one of our product offerings is wholesale managed-modem ports for the legacy dial-up industry. When that outage occurred, our ISP Customers' users in the affected areas we unable to place local dial-up calls into our network from the Verizon footprint for over eight hours.
Therefore, only limited local area calling was available for those users in affected areas that were only placing calls to destinations within their same End Office. Anything needing to egress via the Tandems (911, LD, and Tandem-connected third-party carriers, cellular included) was broken. So unless you were phoning your neighbor or ordering a pizza, you were probably unable to place a call.
And to get back on topic, I would love nothing more than an equal-access, IP-enabled, 911 network. Someone wake me when the FCC develops some common sense. But that is another rant for another time.
The Verizon DACS appeared to have been knocked out. In the age of terrorism concerns, Verizon needs to take a lesson in network design. The failure apparently took out all point to point, and cell towers linked by Verizon point to point circuits. The outage also affected end office tandem connections. I was flabbergasted at the complete and total failure. The DACS went off-line at approximately 2:23AM in the morning, and was restored by 2:30PM. The only reason our company was operating was due to implementing VOIP using various carriers over a year ago.
While our Internet circuit was down, we had a cable circuit backing us up and this remarkably carried our voice traffic for the day.
With no telecommunication service including 911 available to well over a million customers, the PUC, and the FCC should be looking long and hard at the lessons learned.