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Failure to find: the present and future of Enhanced 9-1-1

By Scott Bradner

A package showed up on my desk the other day from the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), it contained 3 copies of their new publication on positioning enhanced 9-1-1 for an IP-enabled future. The NENA publication is more or less than I expected both for good and bad.

Enhanced 9-1-1(E911) has been around in the wireline world for many years. When you dial "911" the call is directed to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) where the number you called from is looked up in a database, maintained by the phone company, that associates phone numbers with the physical location of the end of the phone wire. It is the responsibility of the phone company to figure out which PSAP, out of the 7,666 currently listed by the FCC (http://www.fcc.gov/911/enhanced/reports/psapregistry.html), to connect the caller to. A significant percentage of the US wireline phone customers are currently covered by E911 and are paying a per month fee to support it (mine is 85 cents). Note that, in most cases, if your company runs its own PBX, the physical location of the phones will not be in the database so the PSAP will not know where you are unless you are able to tell them.

E911 for the 185 million US cellular phone users (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-261444A1.pdf) is a rather different story. The FCC started asking the cell phone carriers to support E911 in 1996., but , to date, only 10 of 390 wireless carriers have complied. The FCC has granted, in whole or in part, 173 of 184 requests by carriers to delay the deadline. (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-257964A1.doc) Compare this to the 120 days the FCC gave the voice over IP carriers to meet the same standards for their 3 million customers. (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/ attachmatch/DOC-258818A1.pdf) Note that both wireless and VoIP E911 is a lot harder to do because there can be no database of where a mobile caller might happen to be when they called 911, thus other methods to determine location must be developed.

The NENA "initial findings and recommendations" (Next Generation 9-1-1: Responding to an Urgent Need for Change - http://www.nena.org/media/files/ng_final_copy_lo-rez.pdf) are addressing the structure of future emergency communications, not limited to just E911. The basic structure they describe comes from a December 2005 report of focus group 1D of the National Reliability and Interoperability Council; (NRIC - http://www.nric.org) titled "Communication Issues for Emergency

Communications Beyond E911" (http://www.nric.org/meetings/docs/meeting_20051216/FG1D_Dec%2005_Final%20Report.pdf). (I participated in a number of the phone calls of this focus group but do not claim to be responsible for the design - even though I think it’s a good one.)

The NENA publication does change the emphasis in one area. The NRIC FG 1D report said a number of times that the "group does not believe a new physical network is needed" and that the data networks, both existing and new, "should be organized in a distributed, not a hierarchical, architecture, embracing a multiplicity of communications pathways and methods based on the Internet model." NENA publication talks about "a hierarchy of interconnected local, regional and national IP networks that would enable NG 9-1-1 and many other emergency communications applications." The reports basically calls for the creation of a new "Emergency Services IP Network" rather than for using existing facilities wherever possible as the NRIC FG 1D report does. Looking at the list of NEA "program partners" one can see why the idea of governments spending lots of money on new networks might be seen as a good idea.

There is a lot of good information in the NENA publication, even if you are not an equipment or services vendor, but clearly some people think that feathering one's own nest while protecting public safety is just common sense.

disclaimer: Some people have claimed that "Harvard" and "common sense" should not be used together but I did not ask the university about the above observations so am expressing my own opinion.