IT architects need to address 911 location tracking and PSAP call forwarding as part of their overall deployment strategy, especially for mobile, wireless, and teleworking users.

Supporting 911 location awareness is one of those necessary evils in IP telephony and UC engineering. It doesn't provide a return on investment, a dramatic new service capability that improves productivity or business processes, and it certainly doesn't contribute to additional revenue. But failure to address 911 requirements can open companies up to significant risk, both legal and financial.

We're all familiar with the trends that are driving corporate communications and collaboration: a need to embrace mobility by extending UC to cell phones, or even replacing desktop phones with some combination of cell phones and/or PC-based softphones. Employees see value in having a single phone number that allows them to work from anywhere, with a consistent set of features and capabilities. "Why can't I just use my iPhone?" is a common refrain we hear from our clients when they speak of requests from the workers they support.

Meanwhile, a desire to reduce real estate and facilities costs is leading an increasing number of companies to move to hoteling models, where employees leave their fixed office locations for a combination of telework and hoteling facilities for those times when they need to meet in person with colleagues, clients, and/or partners.

From a 911 perspective, this rise of mobility and flexible workplaces has a significant impact--phone number no longer equals a fixed location. Rather, phone numbers equal an individual, who may be located at any one of many locations.

Furthermore, states such as Michigan and California are broadening laws requiring operators of multiline telephony systems (MLTS) to provide enhanced 911 information to public safety access point (PSAP) operators; not just a street address, but information that will allow emergency services personal to locate individuals in distress within a location.

Coupled together, mobility and a changing legal environment mean that companies failing to address 911 open themselves to risk. Consider the scenario where an employee working from an office in California uses their softphone to call 911. That call is routed through their PBX in NY which then routes the call to the local PSAP, who dispatches first responders to the NY address associated with that phone number. The end result--emergency personnel fail to locate the individual, leading to not only additional risk for the individual, but potential legal and civil liabilities for the company.

Many of our clients have addressed 911 for their TDM infrastructure, associating phones with enhanced location information (ELIN), with automated updates to the Private Switch/Automatic Location Information (PS/ALI) database as location information changes. But these updates take time to propagate, and as a result the PSAP might not have accurate ELIN information for many hours after a person’s location changes. Even in the IP world, where technologies such as Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) or Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) allow IT architects to automatically discover and track phone location information, updates to the public databases take time. And initial mapping Ethernet ports of IP subnets to specific known locations takes a great deal of resources and requires frequent audits and a solid change management process.