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AT&T Fined $5.25M for Two 911 Outages that Affected 15,000+ Emergency Calls

supercoolmanchu said:
You’re both wrong, barking up inappropriate vegetation or something.

Motorola was Apple’s first ‘cellular’ partner:
motorola_rokr-e1_00.jpg
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No, he's correct. Motorola only made the hardware. Cingular was the FIRST Apple cellular carrier, even for this phone.
 
Aldaris said:
Technically Cingular, who got bought by AT&T.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007...sive-US-Carrier-for-Its-Revolutionary-iPhone/

(But Cingular was owned by AT&T...)
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You got it backwards. Cingular was a joint venture between SBC and BellSouth. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless in 2004 (which itself was a joint venture between AT&T and NTT DoCoMo), at which point the service became Cingular. Cingular only gained limited rights to the AT&T name, so it was phased out from wireless.

SBC then bought AT&T in 2005, and BellSouth in 2006. As as a result of gaining rights to the AT&T name, SBC renamed itself to AT&T, and renamed Cingular to AT&T Mobility.
 
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Here is my problem with this, it is a slap on the wrist and AT&T knew that 911 would go down for its users during this time. As a result, the fine should be more like $525 Billion, that might wake them up.
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1000 others said:
Let's see here...

AT&T Net Income (2017): $29,450,000,000 (Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/t/financials?query=income-statement)

Fine: $5,250,000

Percentage that fine is of AT&T Net Income: $5,250,000 / $29,450,000,000 = 0.0178268251%

Tomorrow's business news headlines: AT&T filing for bankruptcy
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Exactly why I say a fine of $525 Billion would be more appropriate, it would equal several years of income and be more than just a meaningless slap on the wrist. Bottom line is until we start putting some real teeth behind these fines, the companies will just keep doing it and paying the fines.

Kind of like a guy I knew that made several million dollars per year, he would park in various types of no parking zones (never ones that would tow) and he would just pay the parking ticket, counting it as the cost of doing business, no skin off his nose to pay a $100-$200 fine when needed. Again, the fine had not teeth for him because that was basically pocket change to him.
 
cmwade77 said:
Here is my problem with this, it is a slap on the wrist and AT&T knew that 911 would go down for its users during this time. As a result, the fine should be more like $525 Billion, that might wake them up.
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Exactly why I say a fine of $525 Billion would be more appropriate, it would equal several years of income and be more than just a meaningless slap on the wrist. Bottom line is until we start putting some real teeth behind these fines, the companies will just keep doing it and paying the fines.

Kind of like a guy I knew that made several million dollars per year, he would park in various types of no parking zones (never ones that would tow) and he would just pay the parking ticket, counting it as the cost of doing business, no skin off his nose to pay a $100-$200 fine when needed. Again, the fine had not teeth for him because that was basically pocket change to him.
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Honestly this is one of the dumbest responses I’ve ever read. Using your logic speeding tickets should cost people fives times their salary so, you know, they don’t do it again. It’s a fine, it’s probably a structured rate. Don’t be so dramatic.
 
That fine is way way way too low, should have been a lot higher to stress the importance. They are supposed to have multiple back ups for 911 calls if it’s like the U.K. and they must be properly maintained. It’s peoples lives at the end of the day.
 
So now everyone is going to see a new and ambiguous “government regulatory accommodation” fee tacked onto their bills to recover this loss?
 
"during a five hour outage"

Five whole hours ?

Kinda ridiculous, as AT&T get fined for this, but Telstra here in Australia has more outages, and i could say the same there as well, yet they get off scott free.

Perhaps these services ought to think abut providing users with a 'backup", then they'll realize just how important a cell phone is in these situations
 
Could this fine be the reason -

AT&T has raised the amount of the "administrative fee" that it charges many of its 64.5 million wireless customers, a move that will earn the company an additional $800 million in annual revenue.
 
So At&t screws up, thousands of people may have been critically affected, and the Govt makes $5.2M...very interesting indeed!! ...
 
Could someone point me in the direction it mentions “APPLE” in this news story...

Fresh news(dunno how it wasnt front page news), my phone company in Australia announced they will give $10 credit to users affected by 3 hour service disruption last month.. will forward to editor lol
 
If you call 112 in Europe (the equivalent of 911) on a mobile phone it will automatically use any mobile network that covers the place even if you are not a customer of that network. This makes mobile phones very reliable for emergency calling because a simultaneous outage in 3 or 4 networks is very a unlikely event (I don't know if it ever happened).

I would assume the same in the US?


Sevendaymelee said:
Landlines are still, even in 2018, more reliable than cell phones. Ridiculous.
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