[V]ermont has settled a legal dispute with its Enhanced 911 company, putting the state on track to receive all of its E-911 services through FairPoint Communications.
The state agreed April 8 to pay $430,000 to settle a dispute with Intrado Inc., of Longmont, Colorado, and will retain the right to use Intrado as a backup E-911 provider through Oct. 31.
For “accounting purposes,” Intrado can treat the lump sum as payment for two specific sections of its contract — a section worth $415,000 and another worth $150,000.
Intrado claimed the state owed the company money for final testing and acceptance of the company’s E-911 operating system and validation of a specific mapping technology.
Under the contract, Intrado was allowed to bill the state if the E-911 board didn’t notify the company in writing that the state had tested Intrado’s system and either accepted it or found defects.
As part of the $430,000 settlement, the state must pay $15,800 per month in May, June and July for transitioning the system to FairPoint. The state must pay up to $219,400 more for “extended maintenance services” in July.
The settlement agreement extends Intrado’s original contract to Aug. 5 — one week after FairPoint’s July 31 deadline to have its proprietary system up and running — to give both parties a “soak period.”
The state maintains the option to extend Intrado’s contract on a month-to-month basis through the end of October, and Intrado must be completely uninvolved with Vermont’s 911 system by November.
Intrado’s contract started April 7, 2010, and was scheduled to last for about five years. But the state essentially dropped it as a contractor not long after Intrado’s E-911 system suffered a 40-minute outage Aug. 6, 2014.
On Aug. 7, 2014, the now-former E-911 Board executive director, David Tucker, said he would bring the FCC into a formal investigation of Intrado. The company blamed the outage on a “double equipment failure,” according to a news release from Tucker.
“We are disappointed with the performance of our technology vendor, both for the fact that the system failed and also for the time it took to get the call-back numbers for those who were not able to get through to 911 during the outage,” Tucker said in August.
On Nov. 5, not long after publicly criticizing Intrado, the state signed a five-year, $11.2 million contract with FairPoint. Under the contract, the state pays about $1.8 million to FairPoint to set up a proprietary operating system. The FairPoint system must be ready by July 31.
FairPoint’s system must include new workstations for workers at public safety answering points, text-to-911 capability, mapping and other features. Intrado must hand over data on Vermonters that it uses to run the 911 system. After the cutover, the state will pay FairPoint about $157,000 per month for operations and maintenance, for a total of about $9.4 million under the contract.
That FairPoint deal came just weeks before Nov. 28, when the company’s SS7 technology — a portion of the system that allows all phone calls to go through — went down for six hours. The Department of Public Service had already been planning to open a residential service quality investigation with the Public Service Board. The PSB opened the investigation on Jan. 8.
FairPoint representative John Lunny said on April 15 that the Nov. 28 outage was a highly improbable “triple equipment failure.” Lunny said that the company “plans to deliver calls to the new [911] system in the same manner, using SS7 technology, as today.” He said FairPoint would upgrade some equipment that backs up its SS7 technology, which helps allow all calls to go through.
The PSB has since postponed the investigation’s hearings until Sept. 16 — more than six weeks after FairPoint’s proprietary E-911 system was originally slated to be operating without any help from Intrado. The Department of Public Service reports it is in a discovery dispute with FairPoint.
A provision in the settlement will let the state use Intrado as backup through October. Barb Neal, the interim executive director of the E-911 board, said having a “backup” provision is standard procedure.
E-911 functionality, operating structure questioned
Meanwhile, the ability of FairPoint to provide reliable E-911 services given complaints about its underlying landline phone connection system is raising questions in the Legislature. And the governance structure of 911 services in Vermont is still up in the air.
Steve Whitaker, a telecommunications advocate, called the FairPoint contract “flawed” before the Senate Finance Committee last week. Whitaker said that FairPoint’s system has not been “proved safe or studied” by engineers, and he is not confident that FairPoint can implement text-to-911 without using a subcontractor.
FairPoint’s spokesperson, Angelynne Beaudry, issued a statement Thursday in response to a query from VTDigger, saying the project is “on schedule” and “in compliance with all aspects and requirements of the contract,” including text-to-911.
The structure of the quasi-independent Enhanced 911 Board, also remains in question. The state has given Mike Smith, a former secretary of the Agency of Administration and former FairPoint executive, a $70,000 contract to report on the ideal governance structure for E-911.
Shortly after his hiring, members of the Senate Finance Committee introduced an amendment to H.117, the telecom bill, that would move the E-911 Board under the purview of the Department of Public Safety. (The language was part of a separate bill earlier in the session, but Senate Government Operations abandoned testimony on it and planned to revisit the issue next year.)
It’s not clear whether Senate Finance will have time to review the E-911 amendment before the session adjourns Currently, the amendment is before the Senate Government Operations to consider a request from the grassroots municipal telecom company ECFiber. Testimony is scheduled for Tuesday.
But if the amendment to put E-911 under the Department of Public Safety passes the Senate and is approved by the House, Smith said he would recommend to the Shumlin administration that he not conduct the study for which he was hired.
