The settlement was prompted by a Federal Communications
Commission investigation into a more than 12-hour outage in June 2020 that led
to congestion across No. 3 wireless carrier T-Mobile's networks, and caused
"the complete failure of more than 23,000 911 calls."
T-Mobile as part of the consent decree with the FCC has also
agreed to make new commitments to improve 911 outage notices.
An October 2020 FCC report found the T-Mobile outage
disrupted calling and texting services nationwide and access to data service in
some areas. It resulted in at least 250 million total calls failing.
The FCC estimated "over 250 million calls ... from
other service providers' subscribers to T-Mobile subscribers failed due to the
outage" and "at least 41 percent of all calls that attempted to use
T-Mobile's network during the outage did not complete successfully."
T-Mobile said Tuesday it has "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."
Then-FCC chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC staff report showed
the company did not follow established network reliability best practices that
could have potentially prevented or mitigated the outage.
The FCC report said the outage was caused "by an
equipment failure and then exacerbated by a network routing misconfiguration
that occurred when T-Mobile introduced a new router into its network."
T-Mobile said earlier its network experienced an 18 percent reduction in completed calls during the outage but in the report acknowledged network congestion "likely required many of its subscribers to make 2-3 call attempts before successfully connecting." © Reuters