Award Consulting is a remote team. Very remote. Since I started the company in 2016 the only team member I had seen in person was Stephen Denny. That’s one person (5 years ago) out of a team of eight people. That’s… not great. But that all changed on May 18 when (almost) the entire team… Continue Reading
Articles
16 days without 911, and a $227k fine
If I’ve learned one thing in my 18 years of working in telecoms, it’s that people don’t like outages. And they especially don’t like outages that impact 911 service. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened for subscribers in four counties in West Virginia, for a 16 day period in April 2022. Apparently the local ILEC, Shenandoah… Continue Reading
Telecoms = Painfully Slow Obsolescence
I read a fascinating article this week by Doug Dawson from CCG Consulting. You can read it here – I’d encourage you to read it all. I’ll wait. For those who were too lazy to read it, I’m not angry, but I am disappointed… Unfortunately, for the sake of my article, I can’t help but… Continue Reading
Crashing and burning: what can we learn from the SpaceX explosion?
I imagine most of you have already heard that SpaceX attempted to launch a huge rocket on Thursday last week (April 20, 2023). According to Elon Musk, this was a great success – he tweeted, “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!”. Check out the video below and see for yourself –… Continue Reading
A framework for thinking about Ray Baum’s Act
Anyone offering 911 services to businesses should be familiar with Ray Baum’s Act. I’ve written about it before (read the linked article if you need the background), but in summary, it’s all about making sure that 911 operators are able to identify a dispatchable location (more accurate than just the street address) for a 911… Continue Reading
You may need to update your Robocall Mitigation Plan
Last week the FCC issued the Sixth Report and Order related to STIR/SHAKEN – and you may need to take some actions as a result. This update is not particularly controversial – and sadly it doesn’t yet address the issue of TDM calls – but it does contain a few sensible improvements to the rules:… Continue Reading