mobloc8

The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International (APCO) has complained to the FCC about Vonage’s proposed interim method of handling E911 VoIP calls.

Vonage is proposing to route E911 VoIP calls to the 10-digit administrative number of the nearest PSAP, until they can get a proper E911 solution running.

APCO is taking the position that all new technologies such as VoIP should be required to support E911 properly. Expecting PSAPs to respond to emergency calls on administrative numbers disrupts and strains their limited resources.

Source.

Google has had a lot of press lately for their local search for mobile phone users, but they’re certainly not the only game in town.

Check out SearchEngineWatch’s roundup of local mobile search tools. Lots of cool stuff.

TruePosition today announced a hosted solution for wireless location, designed to help rural carriers meet the FCC’s E911 Phase II requirements.

This type of hosted solution is great for smaller wireless carriers, as it helps them avoid the upfront capital cost of mobile location infrastructure. It also removes the ongoing burden of maintenance and operation of the equipment.

This particular service seems to rely primarily on the network-based U-TDOA (Uplink Time Difference Of Arrival) location technology.

Source.

Google has developed a new service that enables cell phone users in the US to search Google Local directly from their mobile handset.

Although it doesn’t use any sort of mobile location technology (users enter their location in manually), this is a fascinating local search service. It’s quite likely that they will eventually support location lookup as location services become more widespread, which will make the mobile search even more valuable to users.

Google has a reputation for innovation, so it’ll be interesting to see where they take this concept.

Source.

Time is running out for fast-growing Net phone providers to fully support 911 emergency services, a key but costly public safety feature that few now provide.

This is a pretty good rundown on the current issues surrounding VoIP and its support of E911 in the USA.

Source.

NENA and America Online, Inc issued a joint release April 7 announcing that AOL and NENA will work together to develop a multi-faceted public awareness campaign and AOL has joined the Next Generation E9-1-1 Program, as a member of the Operational/Educational roundtable. AOL’s VoIP service, which is being offered, starting the same day, does include E9-1-1 as a standard feature.

Source.

If you want to know more about how the FCC’s wireless Enhanced 911 (E911) rules work, the best place to start is at their own web site.

There you’ll find information on previous and upcoming hearings and statements, reports, press releases, waivers and more. They also make available Phase II quarterly reports for most carriers (some carriers are not required to lodge reports), so you can check up how each one is doing in their deployment of E911 services.

Another article on the controversial Vonage VoIP 911 service, and the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit against them.

A sticking point seems to be the fact that Vonage requires manual activation of the 911 service, where the consumer needs to ring up and specify the address at which the phone is installed so that emergency calls can be routed to the correct PSAP.

Some are suggesting that Vonage should collect the customer’s address when the VoIP service is first ordered, and activate the 911 service before shipping the equipment. But Vonage counters that they never really know what address the equipment will be installed at. In fact, one of the benefits of Vonage’s VoIP service is that the customer can move the phone to wherever they have broadband access. When that happens, the customer is supposed to ring up and have their 911 address updated.

The software to map the subscriber’s physical address to the nearest PSAP is provided by Intrado.

It’ll be interesting to see where this case ends up. The cynic in me thinks that the incumbent phone companies will leverage the E911 issue to stall the rollout of VoIP and protect their lucrative voice business, or force VoIP providers to pay them to access 911 services. What do you think?

Source.

Source.

More AGPS handsets are on the way…

Designated the HP iPaq hw6500 series, the GSM/GPRS/EDGE devices are aimed at exploiting opportunity represented by the remaining sentiment towards pocket PC/exchange devices as well as the desire amongst corporate and SME users to have instant, always-on email in the same fashion as the popular BlackBerry from Research in Motion.

…

It is understood that the new hw6500 series will come in two versions — with or without a 1.3 megapixel digital camera. The device will also make use of a new global positioning position (GPS) technology called AGPS that works twice as fast as existing GPS systems.

Feel free to link to product reviews etc in the comments below.

Washington State charges a 20c per month Enhanced 911 Tax on every land line and wireless phone account. The money is used to fund the state enhanced 911 telephone system. Local counties may also charge a monthly fee to fund local emergency service communication systems.

Details on the Washington State Department of Revenue site.

From TelecomWeb.

Tier 3 carriers SureWest Wireless and Immix Wireless have decided to use Intrado’s hosted services instead of installing and running their own E911 solution.

This is probably a sensible thing for smaller carriers to do. The cost of installing and maintaining an E911 solution is significant, and with technologies continuing to evolve they could expect even more capital expenditure in the future. Better to let the experts worry about that stuff and stick to core business.

From I-Newswire.com

Sprint has announced the availability of the Sprint PCS Phone SCP-200 by Sanyo. It’ll sell for USD$169.99, or USD$19.99 after rebate. See the link for more details.

This looks like a pretty good, cheap, A-GPS handset for Sprint customers.

From PalmInfoCenter

The Treo 650 looks like a great phone/PDA combo. Various reviewers seem quite impressed with the bundled software and its ease of use. Nice to see another A-GPS enabled phone on the market, too:

The GSM Treo has a quad band wireless radio that uses the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz frequencies. The CDMA model uses a digital dual-band CDMA/1xRTT radio operating on the 800/1900 MHz bands. The GSM model also support high speed EDGE networks with data speeds averaging up to 135 kilobits per second (kbps). It also features E911 compliance with a built in GPS chip that is solely used for the enhanced E911 emergency location service.

One issue seems to be the availability of WiFi drivers, which is a disappointment. According to the article, prices start at USD$449, and range up to USD$699 for the unlocked GSM model.

If you have a Treo 650, please do post your comments below. Feel free to also post links to other reviews and/or good places to buy them.

Join us at the first O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference to explore the emerging consumer and enterprise ecosystems around location-aware technologies–ecosystems that increasingly impact the way we work and play. Location-determining technologies like GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks and networked sensors enable an ever-growing array of capabilities from local search, mapping, and business analytics to enterprise integration, commercial applications, and software infrastructure.

Read more at the Where 2.0 site.

This sounds like a fantastic opportunity to see what other companies are doing in the location marketplace, what’s happening in various countries, what’s coming down the pipe in the next few years, and what the issues are going to be, including security and privacy concerns.

Let’s hope that IT Conversations makes the audio available, like they have for several other recent conferences, for those of us who can’t make it there in person.