Venable partner Jamie Barnett was quoted in a March 10, 2017, Communications Daily article on last week's nationwide outage of 911 service for AT&T customers. The outage lasted about 90 minutes and was apparently the result of a failure in links between AT&T's lines and a company that routes calls to public safety answering points. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating the outage.
"AT&T has always had a very good record on public safety and emergency communications," said Barnett. "They have a staff that pays attention to it, and in this case, the FCC will want to know what happened and what they're going to do to prevent this” from happening again. “The carriers are greatly incentivized to keep their networks operating," he added, otherwise "they hear from their customers who have other options most of the time."