The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reached a $17.5 million settlement with T-Mobile, resolving an investigation into two 911 service outages that occurred on the company?s national network last year. The separate but related outages, which together lasted approximately three hours, prevented T-Mobile customers from reaching first responders when making wireless 911 calls. As part of the settlement, T-Mobile has agreed to strengthen its 911 service procedures and to adopt robust compliance measures to ensure that it adheres to the FCC?s 911 service
reliability and outage notification rules in the future.

In its investigation, the FCC's Enforcement Bureau found that T-Mobile did not provide timely notification of the August 8, 2014, outages to all affected 911 call centers, as required by FCC rules. The investigation also found that the outages would have been avoided if T-Mobile had implemented appropriate safeguards in its 911 network architecture.

To resolve the Bureau?s investigation, T-Mobile will pay a $17.5 million fine and has agreed to implement a compliance program to strengthen its 911 resilience and its 911 risk management processes.

The settlement with T-Mobile represents the largest fine that the FCC has assessed against a carrier in connection with a 911 outage and it is the fourth major enforcement action involving 911 outages that the FCC has taken this year. In April, the FCC entered a $16 million settlement with CenturyLink and a $1.4 million settlement with Intrado Communications in connection with an April 2014 multi-state 911 outage that lasted for over six hours. In March, the FCC settled with Verizon for $3.4 million in connection with the same April 2014 outage.