The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has entered into a Consent Decree with Charter Communications, ending the Commission’s investigation into whether Charter violated FCC rules regarding network outage notifications. FCC Rule 4.9 requires communications providers to quickly notify the FCC of network outages that affect 911 services by submitting a report through the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS). Additionally, covered 911 providers must notify all potentially affected 911 special facilities within 30 minutes of discovering the outage.
With this Consent Decree, Charter has admitted to multiple violations of the rule, including failure to notify more than 1,000 public safety answering points of a February 2023 outage, failure to meet NORS reporting deadlines for three unplanned outages, and failure to meet reporting deadlines for hundreds of planned maintenance outages. Charter has agreed to pay a $15,000,000 civil penalty and implement a compliance plan.
