T-Mobile will settle US probe at 2020 shutdown for $19.5 million

T-Mobile USA has agreed to settle a US investigation for $19.5 million (approximately Rs 145.

The settlement was prompted by a Federal Communications Commission investigating an outage of more than 12 hours in June 2020 that resulted in congestion on wireless carrier #3 By T-Mobile and caused “the complete breakdown of more than 23,000 911 calls.”

T-Mobile is part of a consent decree with the FCC that has also agreed to make new commitments to improve 911 outage notifications.

An October 2020 FCC report found that the outage of T-Mobile disrupted calling and texting services nationwide as well as access to data service in some areas. It resulted in a total of at least 250 million failed calls.

The FCC estimates that “more than 250 million calls … from other carrier subscribers to T-Mobile subscribers failed due to problems” and “at least 41% of all calls trying to use the network” of T-Mobile during the outage failed to do so.” completed successfully. “

T-Mobile said Tuesday that it has “built resiliency into our emergency systems to ensure that our 911 elements are always ready when they are needed. Following this incident, We are immediately taking additional steps to further enhance our network to prevent this type of event from occurring in the future.”

Then-FCC President Ajit Pai said the FCC employee’s report showed that the company’s failure to follow established network reliability best practices could have prevented or mitigated interference. power failure.

The FCC report said the outage was caused by “equipment failure and then exacerbated by network routing misconfigurations that occurred when T-Mobile introduced a new router into its network.”

T-Mobile previously said its network saw an 18% drop in calls completed during the outage but in the report acknowledged network congestion “may require many of their subscribers to make 2- 3 calls before successful connection.”

© Thomson Reuters 2021