February 22, 2011 12:02 pm EDT

Verizon dropped 10,000 emergency calls during January snowstorm in Maryland, FCC finds it 'alarming'

Uh oh, Verizon's got itself into a bit of hot water with the old FCC. An outage during a snowstorm last month has reportedly resulted in a whopping 10,000 calls to 911 not being connected by the big red carrier. That would be bad enough in itself, but the less-than-pleased Communications Commission also notes that the emergency services that missed out on these calls were not alerted to the connectivity failure -- in fact, Maryland's Montgomery County officers were the ones to inform Verizon of the fault it was having, which was then promptly repaired within 15 minutes. The FCC is now curtly asking the network to check its entire footprint for similar vulnerabilities -- as the January events were apparently "not unique" -- and to propose remedial actions and monitoring systems to prevent it happening again.

Verizon dropped 10,000 emergency calls during January snowstorm in Maryland, FCC finds it 'alarming' originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

PermalinkDailyWireless.Org | Bloomberg ||Comments

Original Link: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/22/verizon-dropped-10-000-emergency-calls-during-january-snowstorm/

View Full Article

Engadget

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics. Engadget was launched in March of 2004 in partnership with the Weblogs, Inc. Network (WI

More About this Source Visit Engadget