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Qwest fails again: County 911 service goes down for sixth time in 12 months
By Nathan Gonzalez The Daily Times
Article Launched: 04/30/2007 12:00:00 AM MDT



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if(requestedWidth > 0){ document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').styl e.width = requestedWidth + "px"; document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').styl e.margin = "0px 0px 10px 10px"; } AZTEC — The sixth major phone outage in 12 months by local phone and Internet provider Qwest left San Juan County's 911 dispatch center and some cell phone callers without service for up to two hours Saturday night.
Qwest equipment failed around 7:45 p.m. Saturday, leaving the San Juan County Communications Authority, which receives 911 calls from throughout the county and dispatches for several local agencies, without the use of its non-emergency incoming and outgoing lines, according to the authority.
However, as the telecommunications provider began to repair the authority's lines, service was lost to virtually all cell phone customers calling 911 around 10:38 p.m.
Dispatch personnel utilized a backup system and was able to receive 911 calls via land lines. As officials realized no cell phone calls were coming through, staff members moved to the authority's backup facility at the Four Corner's Regional Airport in Farmington. "This means that from about 10:48 p.m. to about 11:05 p.m., there was no 911 service for
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cell phone callers, a gap of about 17 minutes," a release from the authority states.
Non-emergency and Cellular One customers were not switched over to the backup 911 call center until 1:23 a.m. Sunday, the release states.
The outage left Cellular One customers without 911 service for nearly two hours, according to the authority. The extent of the outage was as follows:
Land line 911 service down 17 minutes.
Cellular 911 service (other than Cellular One) down 36 minutes.
Cellular One customers calling 911 down 1 hour, 54 minutes.
Non-emergency lines to authority personnel down 1 hour, 35 minutes.
"This is the eighth significant 911 outage in San Juan County caused by failure or vandalism of Qwest equipment and lines since October 2005, and the sixth in the last 12 months," according to the authority.
In a recent series in The Daily Times, exposing Qwest's struggles with providing consistent service even to the 911 center, company officials said they are working to create a redundancy loop that would hopefully protect against massive prolonged outages.
"It is a high priority of ours," Gary Younger, a media relations manager for Qwest, said of the redundancy system earlier this month.
Qwest officials said they hope the project would be completed this year, but refused to give a timeline. Younger said the company still requires the needed right of way.
"Rights of way are a sticky issue, and if I reveal an area the line may go through, we don't want to paint a big, fat target on it for future vandals," Younger said at the time. Twenty-nine projects around the state are scheduled to be completed in the next 42 months at an estimated cost of $30 million, he added.




http://www.daily-times.com/ci_5782229

can you imagine one of our larger city's with no 911 for any period of time?

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