What's Your 20?

By Erik Linask

Associate Editor,
Internet Telephony magazine

 

Perhaps you noticed Dash911’s presence at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo in San Diego — it was not difficult.  In fact, if you walked into the keynote hall on Friday morning as the company’s CEO Gregory Giagnocavo was speaking, you would certainly have stayed for the duration.  In what was a lively and entertaining presentation, Giagnocavo spared the audience a monotonous lecture on the technical challenges of delivering 911 for VoIP. 

 

Giagnocavo began by simply noting that the concept of 911 is simple — you dial 9-1-1 and are connected to the local PSAP.  The fact that technology has advanced and VoIP has created inherent challenges makes little difference to the FCC (News - Alert) — “if it looks like a phone, it’s supposed to act like a phone.”

 

Naturally, the difficulties arise out of the very service variant customers crave: mobility.  It is innately more difficult to deliver nomadic 911 than fixed 911.  In the past, before this age of VoIP and mobility, it was all about fixed services, where 911 was included with service from your traditional telco. 

 

“That’s the way it was designed, and that’s the way it worked,” said Giagnocavo.  “Everything was local; if you dialed 9-1-1 from one area code, you had to be in that area code, so that was not an issue.”

 

To the contrary, he pointed out, with nomadic services, not everything can be trusted.  Just because my caller ID shows an Iowa number does not mean I’m calling you from Iowa.  When you set up your VoIP account, one of the questions you are asked is from which state you would like a number.  This means a new mechanism is needed for location determination.

 

The key to VoIP 911 — any 911 service, for that matter — is the caller’s address.  With the old fixed 911, it was a non-issue; the address was the address to which the phone was registered.  Now with VoIP and its associated options for mobility, users have to be able to manually let their service provider know when they have changed locations.  You certainly don’t want to go to San Diego and have your provider think you’re still in Chicago.  The problem is also that any automatic location determination system available currently is not exact enough and doesn’t work in three dimensions.

 

With 18 million VoIP users, 700 selective routers, and 8,000 PSAPs with varied connectivity and few standards, and with various different RBOCs involved with regional differences and more than 11,000 boundary changes each month, it is hardly surprising that it has been difficult to get everything to connect to everything else in order to properly implement nomadic VoIP 911, explained Giagnocavo.

 

Of course, in addition to the inherent difficulties in getting all these various pieces to cooperate, the FCC has set unrealistic expectations for V911.  Providers have been working hard, he claimed, and have invested tens of millions of dollars.  But it will take time and effort to complete the process.

 

For now, the key remains the manually updated subscriber address (Giagnocavo points out that nearly half of the addresses V911 providers have on file are incorrect), without which, emergency services can be delayed or even fail to be dispatched at all.  Of course, according to data from actual calls, four out of five calls to emergency operators are not true emergencies, and half are not even related to the caller’s address.

 

Giagnocavo evoked laughter from his audience when he cited three examples of non-emergency calls that had come in:  “Where can I buy a chinchilla for my daughter’s birthday?”  “I’m trying to dial my sister; do you know how to find her?”  “I need that government daycare thing, but they is closed.”

 

The fact is that providers are keenly aware of the need for offering the very best in emergency-related services, and they want to do so, but there are challenges beyond their control with which they must contend.

 

As for misdials and non-emergency calls, there is the option to charge customers after the first instance, much like security monitoring companies do with false alarms.  And, says Giagnocavo, it is not only important to promote V911 services, but providers should also charge for it.  There will be other costs in the future, and it will beneficial if customers have already been trained to pay for such added services.

 

But the bottom line is that the FCC requires it, customer want it, and we need it in order to ensure a safer community, so there is no reason not to have it.  And for all its challenges and current shortcomings, Giagnocavo says, “Hang in there with e911 (News - Alert) for VoIP —  It’s going to get better.  Soon.”