AT&T Wireless to pay $2 million to settle E911 probe

Computerworld - AT&T Wireless Services Inc. has agreed to pay $2 million to the government to settle an investigation into possible violations of the Federal Communications Commission's Enhanced 911 (E911) automatic location-identification requirements.
In May, the FCC alleged that the Redmond, Wash.-based carrier failed to meet a number of deadlines for implementing improved location services over its Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network. Those services would allow rescue personnel to more accurately pinpoint the location of people who dial 911 from mobile telephones.
As part of the settlement, the FCC said AT&T also agreed to certain deadlines for deploying location technology in its GSM network, including implementing it in a minimum of 1,000 cell sites by Jan. 31, 2003, while incrementally increasing that number to 8,000 by June 30, 2004.
If AT&T misses any of its deadlines, it would be fined $450,000 for the first missed deadline, $900,000 for the second and $1.8 million for any others.
In April, the FCC granted an extension to AT&T allowing the company more time to comply with the requirements for deploying E911 service over its GSM network. That month, the FCC also granted AT&T a temporary, conditional waiver that gave the carrier more time to implement the location accuracy requirements. However, the FCC said AT&T failed to meet the requirements of that waiver.
AT&T spokeswoman Rochelle Cohen said the settlement allows the company to focus on what's most important, providing the second phase of E911 service to GSM customers.
"We now have a set of ambitious but more practical deployment benchmarks to reach, and we're hard at work on reaching them," she said.
In its filings with the FCC, AT&T contended that its vendors were responsible for the problems it had implementing the second phase of E911 service, which more accurately identifies a caller's location, because they couldn't deliver the necessary technology on time.