FCC Presents Early Findings On Why Some AT&T Customers Couldn't Dial 911
BUCKS COUTNY (CBS) -- A problem earlier this month prevented AT&T wireless customers in suburban Philadelphia and at least a dozen other states from calling 911.
Government investigators have been looking into what happened, and today presented early findings during a meeting of the Federal Communications Commission.
On March 8th...
FCC's Lisa Fowlkes said, "Approximately 12,600 unique callers were not able to reach 911 directly."
Including in Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties. Fowlkes says the outage affected people using what's called Voice over LTE -- when phone calls are transmitted over the data network.
"It appears AT&T reconfigured connections in its network that affected 911 call routing for its Voice over LTE subscribers," she said.
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The fallback system for routing calls, she says, couldn't handle the volume.
"Resulting in a large number of calls being blocked," Fowlkes said.
Another outage, which AT&T blames on a hardware failure, happened three days later.
As the FCC continues to investigate, officials say AT&T has been fully cooperative.