New Outage and Call Completion Requirements in California

On December 27, 2016, the California Public Utilities Commission (“CPUC”) issued its 180-page plus final decision in its rural call completion proceeding (R.14-05-012). The decision passed at the December 15 CPUC business meeting by a 3-2 vote. The decision leaves open a Phase II of the proceeding to focus on outage and call completion reporting.  Most notably, the decision orders carriers to do the following:

• Respond to the Communications Division’s (“CD”) forthcoming standing data requests regarding outages of 90,000 user minutes that last for 30 minutes or more, and the number of user minutes affected by transport outages. Provide concurrent notice to California Office of Emergency Services (“OES”), no later than 60 minutes after their discovery of such outages;
• By January 26, provide city, county, and federally recognized tribal OES officials an emergency contact name and number available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that is not a general public 800 or 8xx number;
• By January 26, 2017 educate Multi-line Telephone System (“MLTS”) customers about steps to enable short code access, and reprogram MLTS systems to enable short codes, with opt-out;
• By March 1, 2017, evaluate the practice of attaching facilities to trees and report back to the Commission;
• Beginning April 1, 2017, submit an itemized report to CD on a quarterly basis about call completion problems (CD will develop the template);
• By end of first quarter of 2017, meet and confer with 211 and 811 coalitions to discuss short code access and education; and
• By June 30, 2017, meet and confer with federally-recognized tribes and county OES offices to determine if action is needed to make residential addresses visible to the 911 database, including assigning a unique address by mutual agreement in areas where all households currently have the same address.