The FCC has denied the Competitive Carrier Association’s (CCA) Petition for Reconsideration of two 911 service outage rules that impose reporting and database maintenance obligations on originating service providers (OSPs). Under the rules, OSPs must notify the FCC and any potentially affected 911 special facility of an outage that could affect 911 service within 30 minutes of discovering the outage. Additionally, OSPs must use “special diligence” to identify, maintain, and annually confirm the contact information used to provide outage notification to 911 special facilities. CCA argued that the requirements were unduly burdensome to small and rural carriers, and that the FCC has miscalculated the cost of the database maintenance.
In denying the petition, the FCC found CCA had repeated arguments opposing the 30-minute requirement that were previously rejected. While the FCC acknowledged that the cost of maintaining contact information was higher than originally estimated, it found the benefits of the requirement continued to exceed the costs on OSPs.
