The FCC has fined Charter Communications $15 million after an Enforcement Bureau investigation into the telecom giant failed to comply with 911 and network outage rules. Marketed by the trade name of Spectrum, Charter agreed to pay the fine as part of the settlement, and admitted to violating the FCC’s rules by failing to notify the agency of three unplanned network outages, and hundreds of planned, maintenance-related network outages that occurred last year.
“A 911 call is likely the most important call a person will ever make. Public safety officials need to be able to inform the public of alternate ways to reach emergency services in the event of an outage,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement. “We’ll keep doing our part to hold communications providers accountable and ensure the public has reliable 911 service.”
As part of the settlement, Charter must implement a robust compliance plan that includes new cybersecurity provisions. On February 19, 2023, Charter failed to notify over 1,000 emergency call centers of disruptions that impacted 911 services and failed to comply with the FCC’s outage reporting rules, according to the Consent Decree. The new cybersecurity measures are first-of-its-kind and include network segmentation and vulnerability mitigation management—related to 911 communications services and network outage reporting.
Charter was supposed to notify the Commission through the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS), but according to the Consent Decree, Charter also failed to notify outages on two other occasions on March 31 and April 26, 2023. Provides are supposed ot notify the FCC of 911 call centers of any outages that are longer than 30 minutes as soon as posibble. By failing to notify public safety answering points (PSAPs) of outages, Charter agreed to pay the $15 million penalty, along with the compliance plan remaining in effect for three years.
In the decree, Charter was “the target of a minor, low and slow Denial of Service (DoS) attack” which lead to VoIP telephony service outages for approximately 400,000 residential and commercial interconnected VoIP customers in portions of 41 states and D.C. The decree states that “Charter was required to notify all of the impacted PSAPs “as soon as possible,” but due to a clerical error associated with the sending of an email notification, over 1,000 PSAPs were not contacted.”
“The Enforcement Bureau takes any potential violations of the 911 rules extremely seriously, including outage notification requirements,” said Loyaan A. Egal, Chief of the Enforcement Bureau. “We will continue working to ensure that communications providers abide by these critical public safety rules and to ensure that cybersecurity measures are implemented to provide resiliency to critical infrastructure communications networks and services.”
In the first half of 2024, Charter lost over 1.7 million cable TV and nearly 300,000 internet customers. That is on pace for more cable TV customers lost by the company in 2023.