General Communications Settles 911 Outage Investigation for $2.4 Million

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The FCC's Enforcement Bureau has settled a wireless 911 outage complaint against Alaska telecom and cable company General Communications Inc. (GCI) for $2.4 million.

In addition to the monetary forfeiture, GCI agreed to "strengthen its procedures" for delivering 911 and adopt a "robust" compliance regime.

At issue were service outages between 2008 and April of this year. The FCC concluded that all the outages, which affected 911 service, could have been prevented or minimized if GCI had the "appropriate" safeguards.

The FCC also said GCI did not file timely outage reports with the FCC in four of the five outages.

John Eggerton
John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.