Alyson Sheppard
Audio By Carbonatix
Twice in a little over a week, T-Mobile customers in Dallas weren’t been able to call 911. It’s a problem that’s cropped up in the past and still occurs occasionally today.
“T-Mobile customers may not be able to call or text 911 in Dallas and surrounding areas,” the Dallas Police Department wrote in a May 25 social media post. “The issue lies in the T-Mobile network and not the DPD 911 system.”
On June 2, DPD had to make a similar post.
“T-Mobile is once again reporting issues with its network,” the department wrote. “At present, T-Mobile customers in areas of Dallas may not be able to use their cell phones to make calls.”
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It’s not the first time this has happened, and the problem hasn’t been exclusive to T-Mobile.
In November, T-Mobile was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission to pay a $19.5 million fine because it failed to connect over 23,000 calls to police in 2020, according to pcmag.com.
In a statement about the settlement at the time, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said: “The most important phone call you ever make may be a call to 911. It’s vital that phone companies prevent these outages wherever possible and provide prompt and sufficient notification to 911 call centers when they do occur.”
The outage in 2020 was blamed partially on issues with T-Mobile’s own network. The problem, according to the FCC, was “compounded by a temporary routing flaw in a single location and two previously undetected flaws in third-party software.”
But, T-Mobile still had to cough up nearly $20 million and implement a plan to prevent and respond to outages in the future. That same year, other companies – AT&T, Verizon, Intrado, Lumen Technologies – faced similar outages and had to pay the FCC a combined $6 million in fines. They also had to agree to take steps to prevent future outages.
These agreements with the FCC were similar to another one T-Mobile reached after similar problems in 2014.
That year, two outages lasting about three hours kept T-Mobile customers from being able to connect to police call centers. That time, T-Mobile had to pay a $17.5 million settlement with the FCC and adopt new compliance measures that could prevent such problems. Also in 2014, Verizon saw a similar outage and had to pay the FCC $3.4 million.
In an emailed statement, T-Mobile said it is not experiencing an increase in outages.
“Network service can be affected by factors such as weather, power outages, or third party fiber cuts for example, the same issues that all wireless carriers have always dealt with,” the company said. “What you may be seeing is more proactive, public-facing alerts that local agencies may choose to issue in their areas when we have outages that could impact calling.”
With overlapping coverage across its network, the company said many customers in affected areas won’t usually experience interruptions in service. “We have continually invested in network resiliency for just this purpose,” the company said.
For DPD’s part, they’re saying it’s not their fault.
“This has been a T-Mobile issue that is not related to Dallas Police Department’s 911 services,” the department said in an emailed statement to the Observer. “When we are notified by T-Mobile, we make sure we make the community aware.”
If T-Mobile customers are having trouble getting through to 911, DPD says they can try calling 214-744-4444 to reach someone at the call center.
