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.
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?
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.
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.
From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
This article looks at a few applications to track children (and cars) using GPS-enabled mobile phones. As the reporter points out, these types of applications always hit up against the “Big Brother” issue - people simply don’t like the idea that they’re being tracked everywhere they go.
Child experts and parents agree that while such devices may temporarily solve reckless driving and help keep children safe, they do not address the underlying parent-child trust issue. Parents must stay involved in their children’s lives and maintain an open channel of communication to keep children safe, said Dr. Joanne Kaufman, professor of sociology at the University of Miami.
“Such devices facilitate, but don’t replace, actual parenting,” Kaufman said. “If the parent is always intervening, the kid is never going to learn how to be independent.”
What do you think? Under what circumstances do you think it’s OK to track your teenager’s location? Would your kids agree with you?
From Kansas City infoZine.
“Cell phones are immensely useful in reporting crimes, fires, and other emergency situations, but only if our first responders can pinpoint the caller’s location. We are working to expand wireless enhanced 911 service throughout the state and the individuals appointed to the board will play a critical role in this effort,” Governor Sebelius said.
…
The Wireless Enhanced 911 Advisory Board serves as an Advisory Board to the Secretary of Administration with regard to the Wireless Enhanced 911 Grant Fund. The fund provides grants to eligible municipalities’ public safety answering points for implementation of wireless enhanced 911 service; purchase of equipment, upgrades, and modifications solely to process the data elements of wireless enhanced 911 service; and maintenance and license fees for such equipment and training of personnel to operate such equipment.
In his blog, Om Malik, senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine, gives his opinion on the Vonage VoIP E911 case.
Hopefully all the media attention this case is getting will help pave the way to allow VoIP providers to access E911 PSAPs.
From News-Miner.
Fairbanks, Alaska, is finding that even charging the maximum allowable surcharge of 75c per phone line and wireless phone, they come up short in funding E911 services. They want to change the law to allow a maximum surcharge of $2 per phone line or cell phone so that the E911 service can be fully funded.
Currently, the funding shortfall is made up by the city’s taxpayers, mostly through higher property taxes and to a lesser extent alcohol and other taxes.
From RCR Wireless News.
The FCC granted 32 whole or partial waivers for rural wireless carrier enhanced 911 Phase II obligations, and denied or dismissed eight other requests. That makes a total of 175 whole or partial waivers for rural carriers over the past nine years.
A big problem for rural carriers is that they don’t have the density of phone towers to make network-based triangulation techniques feasible.
From BusinessWire.
TechnoCom Corporation(R), a leading provider of wireless location Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), today announced that Triton PCS, a leading operator of wireless services, has purchased the LocatePredict(TM) platform to optimize the deployment of its wireless location infrastructure.
The optimization and planning software will allow Triton PCS to cost effectively deploy its network-based E911 location technologies to yield the optimal accuracy performance based on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E911 mandate.
LocatePredict is a wireless location system design and planning platform for GSM and TDMA that supports a range of network and handset-based location technologies including TDOA, AOA, E-OTD and RF signature systems, as well as hybrids of these technologies. It provides the user with easy-to-grasp graphical predictions and quantitative statistics based on rigorous models and extensive verification through empirical field testing.
From Engadget.
Vonage is being sued for deceptive trade practices by the Texas state attorney general because their VoIP service has 911 calling disabled by default, and doesn’t make it clear enough that it needs to be activated by the purchaser.
This case is a flow-on from the recent shooting incident where a girl tried to call 911 after her parents were shot during a home invasion, but her call didn’t go through because the family had a Vonage VoIP phone without 911 calling enabled. Her parents survived the attack, luckily.
Full details of the suit are posted at the Texas Attorney General web site.
It’s a thorny issue, but more work needs to be done to get support for VoIP calls and tracing for 911 emergency services.
More coverage from the LA Times.
What are your thoughts? Is Vonage in the wrong? Are they being deceptive, or are their customer warnings and information adequate?
From The Business Journal (Kansas City).
Kansas has a system in place whereby $0.25 is charged to every wireless service account per month, and the money raised is distributed to smaller counties to help pay for the equipment, licensing, training, etc required to provide enhanced 911 services. Grants are reviewed and awarded by the Kansas Wireless Enhanced 911 Advisory Board.
From America’s Network.
This is the first offering from a new partnership between Nextel and MapQuest. Services available include a “find me” service to allow a user to pinpoint their location on a map on their phone, services to locate nearby restaurants, hotels, airports, hospitals, etc, as well as maps and navigation directions.
There is also a web-based component to the service, which allows users to share their location anywhere on Nextel’s nationwide network with friends and family. The web site can also be used to track their location history, for example to document a road trip.