The FCC needs to work with the states...

The FCC needs to work with the states to ensure that 911 accountability across jurisdictions “is not diluted,” said FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson in a speech at a NARUC meeting Wednesday, according to a prepared version of the speech the FCC posted Thursday. The FCC and states’ “combined jurisdiction is clear, and we need to adjust our governance to make that clear as well,” he said. The FCC plans to explore 911 accountability issues in the coming months, including ways to ensure all participants are “fully accountable,” including for the carriers, Simpson said. “The buck stops with the carrier,” he said. “The transition to IP does not -- and will not -- absolve providers’ responsibilities for ensuring that 911 functions as our citizens expect it to function.” Simpson said its investigation of a multi-state 911 outage April 9-10 that affected IP-based facilities supporting 911 calls revealed that there’s “a need for close coordination between critical service providers in the end-to-end 911 chain.” Any lack of a shared operational picture, common situational awareness, or a clearly designated “tier one"-level operations center empowered to coordinate rapid localization of problems discovered by other providers can put public safety at risk, Simpson said (http://fcc.us/1yyf20b).