T-Mobile To Pay $19.5 Mln To Settle FCC Investigation

(RTTNews) - T-Mobile has agreed to pay $19.5 million to settle an FCC investigation of a 12-hour service outage in June 2020 that led to thousands of 911 call failures.

As part of the settlement, T-Mobile has committed to improve communications of outrages to emergency call centers as part of its settlement.

The outage happened on June 15, 2020, after a problem in leased fiber link in the T-Mobile network, which led to congestion across the carrier's 4G, 3G and 2G networks. T-Mobile also had problems remotely accessing the fiber link.

According to FCC, nearly 23,000 calls suffered a "complete" failure, while another 20,000 didn't include callback info. The FCC said it "cannot identify the total number of impacted calls."

The FCC started an investigation in December last year. According to the investigation, the outage was caused by the failure of a leased fiber link on the network, a routing flaw in one location, and two flaws in third-party software.

"We understand how critical reliable connectivity is to ensure public safety and we take that responsibility very seriously," T-Mobile said in a statement. "We have built resiliency into our emergency systems to ensure that our 911 elements are available when they're needed. Following this outage, we immediately took additional steps to further enhance our network to prevent this type of event from happening in the future."