On December 27, foreign media 9to5Mac reported that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reached a settlement with operators AT&T, Verizon, Intrado and CenturyLink (now managed by Lumen Technologies) on the issue of people not being able to call 911 during the 2020 power outage, and the above several will pay fines totaling $6 million (about 38.4 million yuan).
For a communications failure that occurred on September 28, 2020, AT&T paid $460,000, Lumen Technologies paid $3.8 million, and Intrado paid $1.7 million. Verizon's communications failure occurred on May 7, 2020, and it was fined $274,000, which is a small amount.
The fines are actually small, and last month, operator T-Mobile suffered a similar communications failure during the nationwide blackout in June, for which T-Mobile needed to pay a fine of $19.5 million.
The FCC said in the report: "It is important that telephone companies prevent these interruptions as much as possible and notify emergency call centers in a timely and adequate manner." AT&T, Lumen Technologies and Intrado were also penalized for not notifying the 911 call center of the failure after the failure occurred. In addition to this, AT&T was penalized for failing to "provide number and location information" during the blackout.
For critical alarm calls such as 911, it is necessary for operators to keep them open at all times, and it is not impossible to connect just because of a power outage. For the problem of power outages, operators need to prepare a perfect solution, prepare UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply uninterruptible power supply), the power supply can be a previously stored battery, but also prepare emergency plans, but also prepare chemical energy as power supply, such as diesel power generation and so on.
In this way, in the event of a long power outage, even if the reserved large battery is used up, it can continue to supply power with chemical fuel. Moreover, the United States has also developed shale gas technology, from an oil importer to an oil exporter, and the cost of using chemical energy is not high.