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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

And what amazes me is that the ISP was content to be a single point of failure for emergency services. I'm no expert, but I'd think a primary design criterion for emergency systems is that they keep working in emergencies.

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My friend and I were just talking about how they should put a bit of oil/natural gas at the top of all those little 911 repeater/tower/whatever things that are sprinkled throughout the city to turn them into a sort of "Beacons of Gondor" type thing, as an absolute-last-resort communication method. Mostly jokingly.

Well... if you put the oil in a small emergency generator it might be more practical, if less romantic.

It’s not the ISP’s responsibility to ensure the customers’ have adequate HA designs for their own systems.

No, but if you are providing voice and telephony services that connect to the public switching network, as CenturyLink does, you absolutely have certain reliability requirements for 911 calls being relayed to local answering points.

I await the results of all the inquiries into this to find out what took place here.

Edit: Oh and "But $ISP doesn't offer traditional phone service, they sell VoIP", is as of 2005 no longer a valid excuse for non-compliance: https://www.fcc.gov/document/commission-requires-interconnec...

This isn't an issue with servicing their direct clients to E911 services, it's cell phone access from various carriers that went out. It's still a bad thing, but not quite the same as what it looks like you're assuming.

No assumptions being made here, just stating matters of fact as to what requirements CTL has for transmitting 911 service, the E911 edit was implied to be supplemental.

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