Got next?

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Donny Jackson

By virtually any measurement, the 911 emergency call system in the U.S. has been an unqualified success, in terms of reliability, coverage, response rates and the number of lives saved. Yet most industry observers agree that the legacy 911 system is ill prepared to maintain these standards in a era dominated by IP-based communications.

The reasons for the limitations are many, not the least of which being that the foundation of 911 networks was established more than 30 years ago, when the only method of real-time communication was telephony over a local network owned by AT&T. Communication via computers was rare and extremely expensive, and regulations of the era, after the breakup of AT&T, prohibited the local phone monopolies — the so-called Baby Bells — from providing computing services and, subsequently, long-distance services.

“That's why you can have two [public-safety answering points] today on opposite sides of the same street, but they can't transfer a call with data information to each other if there is a LATA line between them,” said Lee Moore, the principal of 911 Consult and a former vice chairman of the 911 commission in Elmore County, Ala. “Today, it looks stupid … and everyone likes to make fun of the Bells, but the fact is that they were significantly regulated at the time.”

A much different environment envelops the 911 community today. In addition to the wireline telephone network, U.S. consumers increasingly use wireless and broadband technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP) to make voice calls. Moreover, voice is not the only means of communicating today, as delivering messages with text, photos and even video is commonplace in an IP-centric world — capabilities never envisioned when the existing 911 network was designed.

Given this, consensus is growing that the next generation of 911 services should utilize IP technology. In addition to enabling more robust features and greater cost efficiencies for the 911 network, such a migration should be easier and less expensive than trying to make modern technologies conform to outdated legacy systems.

IP-based 911 systems also would enable affordable redundancy and the ability to re-route 911 calls to other PSAPs when failures occur, which was needed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year, Moore said.

“Now is the time to address this. I don't want to see VoIP — or whatever the next thing down the pipe is — being forced to conform to the old tandem network, which is limited,” he said. “It's very secure, very reliable, but — as we saw last year on the coast [during Hurricane Katrina] — when one of them goes bye-bye, it goes bye-bye. That's because my telco chooses not to have any backup strategy for a tandem failure.”