Slashdot Log In
VoIP 911 Emergency Service: Problems and Fixes
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Sep 11, 2004 02:50 PM
from the phones-came-before-emergency-call-systems dept.
from the phones-came-before-emergency-call-systems dept.
13.7BillionYears writes "Slate explores the technical hurdles VoIP faces in providing 911 emergency services and points to some technical, legislative and commercial workarounds that just might work. Some are the author's own ideas, some are already in the works. Until this little doozie gets solved, VoIP will have to suffer plenty of FUD of the credible variety and may never spark a real revolution. Of course you can always keep analog POTS (plain old telephone service) around like floppies--just for emergencies--but it'll cost you and tie you down in a number of ways."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Know your location? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Know your location? (Score:3, Interesting)
plus auto location has other uses. with a local taxi company it asks you to press a button if you want to go straight away and automagically knows your location. it then gives a single ring to your phone when the taxi has reached your street.
Re:Know your location? (Score:2)
Not hard to remember your address, but what if you only have time to call 911 before the burglar comes into the room and attacks you? And of course currently it is unlikely that you are using Voip if you're not at home, but soon enough there should be widely available wireless, so the odds will be increasing that you could use it.
Re:Know your location? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Know your location? (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case 911 isn't going to help you. By the time the cops arrive you'll be nothing more than a bloody, mangled corpse, practice for junior crime scene technicians.
What you need isn't a phone, but a gun.
Max
Vonage eliminates the need for this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Know your location? (Score:2, Informative)
Tell your kids that you have an emergency phone to call 911 if something bad happens...
keep it plugged in, w/o the battery (most kyocera work without a battery as long as they're plugged in)...
BLAMO... yay for easy solutions...
Re:Know your location? (Score:2)
C
Re:Know your location? (Score:2)
Add to this, PBX systems with secret procedures for getting an outside line, and spiffy telephones with 50 buttons, labeled in Klingon. Then there are places where a 911 call results in the ambulance being dispatched to the location of the PBX, which may be miles away from where the call was made. People have died because of crap like that.
I disagree... (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, definitely. (Score:2)
Re:I disagree... (Score:3, Informative)
Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mine has it (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.twcdigitalphone.com/austin/faq_special
Re:Mine has it (Score:2)
The author of the article is not b***ing about local services like this. He is b***ing about Vonage and other supposedly global portable services. Well, all I can say - tough luck. In fact Vonage should NOT be trying to do anything with 911.
Re:Mine has it (Score:2)
So basically you don't think VoIP should ever be a viable replacement for POTS service? Or do you think people should be just fine without 911?
Re:Mine has it (Score:2)
It's still worth it if you keep POTS (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
My Vonage line has 911 service. It takes them a few days from the time you order to process your physical address, locate the local emergency services that are relevant, and tie it all together into their 911 call center, but once it's set up they claim it all works fine.
Obviously it won't correctly know your location if you pick up your home VoIP box and take it to a hotel or a starbucks access point or something like that - but those sorts of challenges should really be solved by a next generation of 911 technology (which would be as simple as saying that every phone of every type must have a gps receiver, and must send the gps data encoded in some form when dailing 911 (I'm picturing you dial 911 and you hear some high pitched screeches right at first where the call center requests GPS and your phone answers, using analog-modem-like modulation).
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
That's not true for many of the new GPS receiver designs being developed for E911 use with cell phones. An example [fujitsu.com]. That's a 20-30 dB improvement in sensitivity when compared to a typical handheld GPS receiver.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
ooohhh, I got a better idea instead of modulating digital gps data, much simpler:
You design a GPS request protocol that works like this: The requestor sends a short request tone (which could be one of the unused DTMF tones from the 4th row, the old ABCD keys), and then the phone responds with a quick bursted series of DTMF digits, which is a fixed-length numeric encoding of your GPS location (pretty easy to make). DTMF was design to work well over noisy analog lines, so it should be very robust and quick.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Well yes, technically DTMF is a modulation scheme, but encoding and decoding DTMF is way simpler than analog-modem-style modulation, and doesn't involve a lengthy negotiation phase.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
<sarcasm> Orwellian preconditions ... (Score:2, Funny)
Everything will be under control.</sarcasm>
CC.
Uh, no... (Score:3, Informative)
No it won't, the local provider is required to provide 911 service on disconnected lines.
Re:Uh, no... (Score:3, Informative)
In some areas they have enough free pairs and new equipment available that they can leave service terminated lines connected to the switch, in which case they have only "service terminated" connection (there is probably an official name for t
911 is free... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:911 is free... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure you can call, but if your unable to speak coherently, they may not find you in time..
Just a thought.
Re:911 is free... (Score:2)
Re:911 is free... (Score:3, Interesting)
Every POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, e.g. wired telephone line) has two identifiers: the telephone number of the subscriber which may or may not be unique (because of various options such as the main number of a business being used, or a guest dialing a number from their room in a hotel and having the ho
Pots..... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some ways around this... My Router (Sipura spa-3000) can route calls out to a POTS line if you dial 911. You just gotta have a pots line.. My provider (Qwest) will sell me a measured service line for 9 bucks per month. Incoming calls are free, outgoing calls cost 2 cents for first minute one cent for additional minutes. (They didn't advertize this anywhere, I had to ask)
I also hear that if you disconnect your phone line, it is still likely to remain attached to the phone company so that you can call and order service. If the phone company gets a 911 call on the disconnected line, they will still forward it to your 911 center, likely without any ANI/ALI E911 data.. (Try this at your own risk)
another possible solution: (Score:3, Informative)
Just a thought (Score:2)
911 service is a red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole 911 "problem" could be solved in a very simple way - voluntarily. Just add a dohickey to the protocol so that when calling 911 (or any other number you want to send location info to) the phone sends a chunk of data as part of the call. It is up to the phone's owner to program the phone with whatever geographic location information they want transmitted in such cases. For the safety-freaks and soccer moms some phones would come with a GPS that would automagically fill in that chunk with the most recently recorded GPS coordinates. For the privacy-freaks other phones without GPS would require that the current street address be manually typed in, at which point you could easily LIE or just leave it blank if that's what you wanted. Whatever option you choose, the owner of the phone, not the FCC nor the FBI nor the DHS should have control over what is repoted when.
Do that, and all this infrastructure, overhead and complication just goes away, poof! But then so does the ability of the government to use the phone system as a mass-tracking device.
Re:911 service is a red herring (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks, but I'll pass. I don't want anyone tracking my physical location by ANY means unless I specifically grant them permission to do so. Period. As far as I'm concerned a compulsory system is a violation of the spirit of the 4th Amendment, if not the actual letter (and don't give me any bullshit about how I can
Keep your analog (Score:3, Interesting)
Free Cellphones for 911 (Score:2)
Why not keep an old cellphone for 911 service? All cellphones can make 911 calls, wether or not they have any other cellular service. That might be better, since GPS enabled cellphoens can give exact locations.
In fact, one thing you could do is have a wi-fi enabled VOIP handset that uses the internet for regular calls, and cellular service for 911 calls.
Is anyone here actually a VoIP subscriber?? (Score:3, Interesting)
"We have completed your activation request for 911 Dialing. You may now dial 911 from your Vonage DigitalVoice(tm) line. PLEASE DO NOT TEST THE 911 DIALING SERVICE.
When you dial 911, Vonage DigitalVoice(tm) will route your call to the nearest Public Service Answering Point (PSAP) responsible for effecting emergency response services in your area, based on the following address:" (address follows)
Packet8 has real E-911 according to their FAQ:
"Great options for a small monthly fee
* Virtual Phone Numbers
* Enhanced 911
* Toll Free Services
* VideoPhone
* Virtual Office"
Sorry, but 911 wouldn't be enough to keep VoIP from becoming the voice service of the future, although as you can clearly see, it is already pretty standard with most large VoIP providers. What exactly is the problem here?
Surely the information is there (Score:2)
Protocols could be put in place to allow automated recovery of this information. Privacy freaks could evade it pretty easily by going
This is bizarre (Score:4, Interesting)
bounds on a continuous ongoing basis, long before
E911 became available. I understand that the
considerations relative to the market are different
for VOIP, but clearly there is a precedent which
leads to the conclusion that E911 is not crucial
to the uptake of a new telephony delivery format.
It seems terribly perverse to call
it FUD on the one hand, and spread the FUD
with the other hand.
Voip needs to attack the gold numbers next (Score:4, Interesting)
VOIP should make it possible to increase the number of digits to more than 7 for a local number. And because of the numbers (skype I believe is already in millions of users and can dial out to regular lines, vonage is in the hundreds of thousands and growing, my local isp provides his own voip, and so on), it should be possible for a team of skype and vonage, possibly with no one else, to begin the process of increasing a local number from 7 to 10 or 11 digits.
This can be done by the following: treat all 7 digit numbers as a top level number, where if 7 numbers are dialed (or 10/11 with area code), 3 or 4 zeroes are automatically added to the end; the number 212-123-4567 is automatically adjusted by skype/vonage to terminate at 212-123-4567-0000, and users can add additional lines to the base number, or their account, where additional numbers can become 212-123-4567-0010 for a second line, 212-123-4567-0329 for a fax line (spells "fax"), 212-123-4567-2355 for a cell phone (spells "cell"), etc. Users who don't want people to easily guess a fax number can choose a different random number for fax, there are 9,999 possibilities to choose from. Adding 4 digits makes spelling more words possible (a little tough to explain the hold on gold numbers, but diminishes control if you think about the added words that can be spelled).
This would obviously take many years to make work correctly (would break old pbx) but I can make the changes now on my fax machine, most old pbxs are being dropped in favor of voip (especially as the old pbx systems break), and would be limited to skype (which breaks rfcs right now anyway) and vonage (breaks rfcs?), but others can adopt more quickly because the newer equipment can have its firmware upgraded, it isn't hard coded in like old systems, and the new voip systems are directly connected to the internet making upgrades easy (vonage box upgraded itself when plugged in initially).
The time to add numbers is now. this can bring back area codes to some sanity (one area code for whole state would be nice, one code per county would be ok too, but one code for multi-county cities would be better than chopping up a single county into a number of area codes).
I'm sure there are hurdles that others will point out. But skype, with the skype to skype calling, makes it possible to add numbers. If it becomes popular (and I'm betting it would), then others (vonage could do it vonage-to-vonage, vonage-to-skype, skype-to-vonage) would jump in, lest they lose business to skype.
Adding 4 digits (or even 3) to the end of a number would cut dramatically the number of phone numbers needed. And I know small businesses would welcome consolidating fax, cell, pager, and extensions under a single number. They already do this with "hunting" on a single main number anyway. And this is being done more and more with fax numbers, where computerized phone systems make it possible to receive a fax coming in on any phone number, not just dedicated numbers like it used to be.
POTS companies would still have control over, and be able to charge a premium on, gold numbers. But a lot of numbers would be freed under the additional digits, including what are gold numbers, but aren't being charged as such because companies have held the numbers for longer than the gold number charging has been out. And as those gold numbers migrate to oth
Real E911 for VoIP (Score:2, Informative)
Why does this need to be done? (Score:2)
The concept is the same for phone users who aren't in vehicels. The government IMO should not be forcing this on any operator. If having 911 is so important to people they will gravitate towards companies that pr
Packet8 has E911 today (Score:4, Informative)
your address to the operator. On broadbandreports people have tried it and indicte it works properly. pay, play.
Hedley
Let's not let (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, the phone system was not built for 911 service, 911 service was something that was added on, because it was feasible.
Also, in days of your, 911 operators DIDN'T know your address... you had to tell them.... the service was simply so you had an easy to remember number for emergency services.
So sure, let's come up with some good ways to provide 911 service over VoIP.. but let's not let waiting for that slow us down, either.
credible FUD? (Score:3, Insightful)
This has to be one of the stupider statments I have ever read. IF it's true, it's not FUD. Either it is a legitimate concern (which I think this is) or it is a load of higwash and is FUD. Legitimate issues can certainly bring up legitimate concerns, but that doesn't make them FUD.
Re:There are really only 2 issues, both easily sol (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:There are really only 2 issues, both easily sol (Score:2)
Adding battery backup to a VOIP phone is a relatively simple affair vis cell phones and cordless phones. Adding battery backup to a modem (cable or dsl) is also trivial. Don't forget that many people only have cordless phones -- which are already susceptible to power outages. This would be no different.
Your argument also seems to be oblivious to the fact that regular phone lines *do* get cut from accidents and whatnot. Having power temporarily go off in a neighbourhood is no different. The phone companies