VoIP 911 Emergency Service: Problems and Fixes

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."

Comments

Know your location?

[cloudmaster]

Like it's real hard to just remember your address and tell them on the phone where you presentaly are located... If you can't speak, well, it's probably too late for you anyway - and if you're in a strange place, odds are you either 1) know where you are or 2) aren't in a location using VOIP. :)

Re:Know your location?

[Moofie]

If a burglar is in your house, you need a shotgun, not a phone.

Re:Know your location?

[maxpublic]

but what if you only have time to call 911 before the burglar comes into the room and attacks you?

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

Funny...

[comwiz56]

Isn't it funny how everyone is trying to keep VoIP unregulated, but then can't get 911 services. It's a compromise either way.

Re:There are really only 2 issues, both easily sol

[betelgeuse-4]

Third, force power suppliers to provide six nines of uptime, or force all VOIP users to have battery/generator backup that can increase uptime to six nines.

911 service is a red herring

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

This privacy freak is really pissed off that so many people take 911 locator service for VOIP and cell-phones so seriously. It is all just a red-herring to distract us from the fact that they are building location tracking into systems that don't need it.

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.

Let's not let

[mindstrm]

911 get in the way of an otherwise great service.

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?

[dirk]

VoIP will have to suffer plenty of FUD of the credible variety

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.