The Federal Communications Commission has fined GCI $2.4 million for failing to provide reliable 911 service in portions of Alaska.
According to an email from FCC spokesman Will Wiquist, the five outages took place between August 2008 and April 2016. GCI exacerbated the outages, the FCC said, by failing to appropriately report them to 911 call centers or the FCC.
“We’ve had to address situations with outages before,” Wiquist said by phone. “It’s not unheard of, but we take them seriously, and we think it’s important to include both a fine and a compliance (order).”
“The FCC is really demonstrating to carriers that a robust 911 system is a priority,” said Heather Handyside, a spokeswoman for GCI. “That’s the message that they sent.”
Wiquist said confidentiality rules prohibit him from sharing exact details of the outages, but the Alaska Dispatch News reported Wednesday that they affected Nenana and Fairbanks in the Interior, and Hooper Bay in western Alaska.
Each time, the outage was attributable to a software error by GCI.
In the case of the Fairbanks outage, GCI was only alerted to the problem when the Fairbanks North Star Borough realized that 911 calls were not reaching its dispatch center. The borough tracked down the problem and contacted GCI.
David Gibbs, emergency services director for the borough, said that while outages aren’t unheard of, the monthlong GCI outage was unusual.
Federal rules require cellphone and landline telephone providers to connect 911 callers to a call center capable of dispatching emergency services. Any outage of at least 30 minutes must be reported to both the call center and the FCC within a set period of time.
Those rules, said Travis LeBlanc, chief of the FCC’s enforcement bureau, are required to ensure “that reliable 911 service is available to all Americans at all times. … Without access to functional, reliable 911 service, consumers are at risk of being unable to complete one of the most important calls they may ever to make.”
LeBlanc’s statement came as part of a consent decree settling GCI’s violations of the federal 911 rules. The decree calls for GCI to pay a fine of $2.4 million within 30 days. GCI also must implement a compliance plan that will resolve the problems that led to the outages.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GCI’s revenue declined 4 percent in the first quarter of 2016, driven by a declining number of cellphone customers. Between March 31, 2015 and March 31, 2016, GCI lost 12,600 cellphone customers. It still has 226,000 — all in Alaska.
The company is fully able to pay its fine, Handyside said. According to SEC filings, the company had $13.5 million in available cash as of March 31.
