If you're a hard of hearing Sprint customer and you called 911 between March and September 2014, you were probably a little shocked to find that your captioned telephone service didn't work.
The Federal Communications Commission has slapped Sprint with a fairly hefty $1,175,000 fine for the outage, as the system—which basically gives a person captions to read when making a call—is a pretty integral part of the emergency calling process.
According to The Hill, Sprint was unable to accept emergency calls made with the Internet captioning service (which is free for hard-of-hearing customers thanks to federal subsidies) for anywhere from five weeks to 10 months. The exact length of time is unclear, as Sprint was allegedly not even aware of the problem. It even requested reimbursement for the service while it was down.
In addition to Sprint, Hamilton Relay and InnoCaption were fined $235,000 and $25,000, respectively, for similar infractions.
"All Americans must be able to reach 911 in an emergency," said Travis LeBlanc, FCC enforcement bureau chief, in a statement. "Today's settlements reaffirm our commitment to ensure that the hard of hearing community has essential 911 service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not only are we fining these companies for failing to provide this vital services, but we are assuring that they provide it going forward."
Going forward, the three companies will "develop and implement risk management processes" to identify and prevent anything that could result in 911 call failures. They'll also work on implementing new detection systems that should, ideally, tell them if there are any problems before someone else figures it out for them.
Source: pcmag.com
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