When You Dial 911, Can Help Find You?

If you're there. I *do* take my adaptor with me when I go on holiday (my friends who I stay with have ADSL). I also know several people who use VoIP ATA's at work and take them home with them so they can work from home if they need to.

Also you're making the dangerous assumption that the whole world is the USA and uses 911 for emergency access. We don't here in the UK and if I take my ATA to the US with me which country's emergency services would I get..? Which number would I dial, 911 or the UK's 999..?

Ivor

Internet Phones Given 911 Deadline May 19, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Internet phone providers were ordered Thursday to begin supplying reliable 911 emergency call service after regulators heard an anguished Florida woman describe how she was unable to summon help to save her dying infant daughter.

The Federal Communication Commission gave companies 120 days to certify that their customers will be able to reach an emergency dispatcher when they call 911. Also, dispatchers must be able to tell where callers are located and the numbers from which they are calling.

Her voice breaking, Cheryl Waller of Deltona, Fla., told the commissioners before their vote that ''120 days is seven days longer than my daughter lived.'' Julia Waller ''died at 113 days old because I can't reach an operator,'' she said.

Waller said she got a recording when she used her Internet phone to call 911 after her daughter stopped breathing last March. By the time she was able to summon help with a neighbor's phone, the child was dead.

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who began a push for the 911 rules soon after taking over the agency in March, said such situations are ''simply unacceptable.''

''Anyone who dials 911 has a reasonable expectation that he or she will be connected to an emergency operator,'' Martin said.

Internet phone service, known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, shifts calls from wires and switches, using computers and broadband connections to convert sounds into data and transmit them via the Internet.

In many cases, subscribers use conventional phones hooked up to high-speed Internet lines.

But unlike traditional phones, which have a fixed address that a 911 operator can quickly call up, Internet phone service can be mobile. Someone with a laptop who signs up for service in Arizona, for example, may end up calling 911 for an emergency while on a trip to Boston.

Roughly half the nation's estimated 1.5 million VoIP users are served by cable television companies that already provide full-blown 911 capabilities because they only offer phone service to a fixed location.

The FCC's order requires companies that allow customers to use their Internet phones anywhere there is an Internet connection to provide the same emergency capability.

The order follow months of finger-pointing and bickering between VoIP carriers and the traditional local phone companies that own the network connections to the nation's nearly 6,200 ''public safety answer points.''

The FCC order, approved by a 4-0 vote, requires local phone companies to provide access to their E-911 networks -- those that enable emergency operators to identify the location and telephone number of the caller -- to any telecommunications carrier.

Just before the FCC issued its order, Vonage Holdings Corp., one of the largest VoIP carriers, said it had reached an agreement with BellSouth and SBC Communications to purchase E-911 services for its customers.

BellSouth confirmed the deal. A spokesman for SBC said the arrangement has not been completed. Vonage reached a similar deal with Verizon last week.

John Rego, Vonage's chief financial officer, said arrangements with the three companies will enable Vonage to provide E-911 capability to more than 75 percent of its customers. He said negotiations are continuing with Qwest Communications on a deal to cover the other 25 percent.

''We've been trying to get this access for a year,'' Rego said. ''We'll work as diligently as we can to make this happen in the next 120 days. If we don't get there, the FCC will at least be able to see we've made a very good faith effort.''

Companies that fail to meet the 120-day deadline would be subject to the full range of FCC enforcement actions, including fines and cease-and-desist orders.

Under the order, VoIP carriers must provide a way for customers to update their location and callback numbers when they travel. Failure to update that information would cause an emergency operator to assume the call was coming from the last registered location.

The order also requires VoIP carriers to explain to their customers the capabilities and limitations of the emergency response service they are getting with their Internet phones. Connection to a 911 operator, for example, would not be possible for a VOIP customer if there is a power failure or loss of Internet connection.

Internet phone service usually is cheaper than traditional service, ranging from $20 to $50 per month for an unlimited national calling plan. As a result, it has become a rapidly growing industry, something federal regulators said they did not want to slow.

But, commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said, ''We cannot let our desire to see VoIP proliferate come at the cost of providing the best emergency services available today, nor can we afford to take any steps backward.''

The order does not apply to other Internet-based providers, such as those that offer instant messaging or gaming services that contain voice components.

Considering the bullshit the government tried to push down the throats of the cellular providers, I'm not surprised.

That would be the responsibility of the consumer. I keyed my info in by myself and the ANI/ALI gets delivered to the E-911 dispatch center in my state.

I'm also now wondering who's going to take the hit for hotels when a tenant plugs their internet phone into the wall jack. The hi-speed internet service at some hotels requires the tenant to occasionally re-certify their in-room internet service via an auth code provided by the front desk when necessary. And it's not always free.

I almost hate to say it but.... Hooray for the FCC!

NOt at all reasonable, although one that is frequently asked by anal retentive posters.

Ideally both should be supported since 999 doesn't go anywhere else.

My understanding is that if you dial 911 they'll eventually be able to get you though to the right place. Maybe.

However, people aren't likely to be rational when they're going through an emergency themselves.

Hmm, that's going to be an interesting problem to solve, someone using VoIP through an EV-DO card in a laptop while traveling. Some of us have been smart enough to keep our plain old telephone service for precisely this reason.

There are lessons here. One is that if you call 911, TELL THEM WHERE YOU WANT HELP (assuming, of course, that you are able to). What type of help you want comes first, though.

Just because YOU are at a payphone outside a 7-11, that doesn't mean that the guy trapped in an overturned car is there rather than half a mile down the road. GPS is nice, but I bet it doesn't send ALTITUDE over cell phones, so whether you're on the overpass or underpass may affect how long it takes to get an ambulance to you, even if GPS is accurate down to the millimeter. And if you're on the side of the freeway, the GPS may not be able to tell whether you're on the freeway or the access road (maps may not cover every curve of the road, even if GPS is 100% accurate), so again it might matter in getting an ambulance to you. It's also my observation that GPS doesn't work too well inside high-rise office buildings, (couldn't even see one satellite on the top floor) and even if it manages to get close (oh, it's the OTHER tower!) it won't say what floor.

I once got involved in trying to trace a harassing phone call (as the recipient). According to phone company records, there were a pile of phone booths several kilometers high at 1500 Eighth Street, one of them being the phone in question. Actually these phones were in dorms spread over a 5 block by 5 block area. Not all of the dorms actually had street addresses that anyone knew about - many of them were on private roads. The entire campus had their phones at one address. This was well before E911, though. I hope the records are now fixed so if someone needs to locate a phone for reasons more important than harassing phone calls, the caller won't die waiting.

TELL THEM WHERE YOU ARE! This should also include what floor or what room so they have some idea where you might be trapped if you don't get out, even if they have the right street address.

Agreed here.

Another issue which comes up occasionally, but I've luckily never had to deal with it personally: How do I call 911 for another area? Example: I'm talking on the phone to my mother (in another state), she stops talking, groans, says HELP a couple of times, drops the phone, then silence. Assuming I think she might have just had a heart attack, how do I get help for her?

Gordon L. Burditt

When you dial 911 will your call even go through is the instant question and this decision is not a panacea. 911 was entirely developed around traditional Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). That service was delivered over a pair of copper wires that went from a telephone Central Office (CO) to the subscribers premise. It's voice signals were powered from the CO's batteries which were recharged from motor generators driven by the local electrical utility or by on sight generation when utility power was unavailable. Since telephone service developed before rather than after reliable public electrical power was available in many communities the COs were all built to be self sufficient and the local operating companies never changed that practice. None of the new comers to the industry ever tried to imitate the level of reliability that the LOCs achieved. Many of the disputes between the new comers and the LOCs have been about how much access the new comers would have to the LOCs resources rather than the LOCs subscribers. The LOCs have very good reasons to fight against the new comers getting space in the exchanges, access to exchange power, and use of exchange switching equipment at bargain basement rates. All of the new comers attack the LOCs for demanding full cost pricing including a profitable return on the LOCs physical plant investments.

Mean while the rate of telephone service having exceeded 95% of all households nation wide all of the nations major cities have abandoned their once substantial investment in emergency communications systems which allowed citizens to call for help without using the Switched Telephone Network. The most familiar example of such systems was the network of street fire alarm boxes that many cities maintained until the seventies. The signals from those alarms traveled on dedicated wires, over redundant pathways, with continuous supervision of the circuits integrity. Such expensive but very reliable emergency reporting systems only exist as a few remnants in a few places.

As competition puts more and more pressure on investment reliability of service will go the way of the dodo. We may begin to see architects designing watchtowers into new fire stations so the watchman can look for the loom up of the fire within their service areas if the trend continues.

What if the 911 caller is unable or unsure of the address from which they are reporting? That's what E911 is all about.

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Having a sister who's an operator, this is easy for me to answer... in this situation, forget 911, dial "0", when the operator answers, explain that you have an emergency and need to speak to law enforcement for medical assistance in your mother's location. They will make every attempt to connect you to the appropriate authority and will stay on the line until that happens. Operators have been providing this level of service for many years and are glad to help any way they can under these circumstances.

This was precisely the issue when AT&T started providing local exchange service from inside the local CO. Their equipment was piggy-backed onto the emergency power system, thereby deriving the same benefits as the local carrier did. Without equitable pricing, AT&T was getting a cheap ride on some very expensive investments by the local carrier.

Remember that case where two guys on a chat line (or were they playing chess by computer?) and the one in England had a heart attack and the guy in the US called for help?

You have obviously never had any of *your* copyright material used without your permission.

Ivor

Good advice, except that the context of this thread was VoIP, and most VoIP services do NOT have "operator"! (This is how they lower costs.)

Typically, the nominal -48Vdc power for the MTSO/CO is provided by a power system that converts AC to DC. The batteries are only used in the event of a power outage. They are connected via busbar so there is no transfer time. Most critical sites also have one or more backup gen-sets to provide power beyond the battery capacity.

You also need this in the remote/DLC cabinets and cell sites that may be serving the end user. If the cell site or DLC dies, the end sub has no service, regardless of the condition of the upstream MTSO or CO.