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Transforming 911 for the Digital Age

911 works okay, but it is old and there is lots of room for improvement. The information that gets viewed by the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) is very limited, as I learned from Mark Fletcher when I met him at the recent Avaya Engage conference.

Fletcher is the Chief Architect for Worldwide Public Safety Solutions for Avaya. He defines the strategy and feature roadmap for emergency features, and provides input and guidance to the industry through his work with numerous safety services associations, including NENA, EENA, and APCO. He has also been appointed to several FCC Task Force and Workgroups such as the EAAC, the DAC, and the TFOPA.

Yes, that's a lot of acronyms, but the level of Fletcher's involvement in the safety services area establish him as an authority in the communications requirements around 911. Given his level of expertise, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to pick his brain on how 911 works and where opportunity for improvement lies.

911 is about the caller ID, or ANI [Automatic Number Identification]. A special "E911 Tandem" Central Office examines the ANI of the calling device. This is then compared to the Master Street Address Guide to determine the associated 911 center servicing the caller. The call is delivered to the center and the PSAP uses the ANI to lookup the Automatic Location Information (ALI) or address.

The ALI record is returned from a query of an ANI and delivers a 240 character, fixed field NENA2 ASCII record. Buried in this record among other address data is a field known as ADDRESS LINE 2. It is typically 30 to 40 characters in length, and can be populated by commercial PBX owners with any open text by submitting this information to your LEC.

The biggest problem with ALI is that the data becomes stale the instant it is put in place. The data is static, and the process to update it can take days. With our society becoming mobile by nature, this construct of phone numbers equaling locations no longer makes sense.

While work-a-rounds do exist, they are clumsy, costly, and do not actually fix the problem, but only mask it. Monthly recurring charges are required to maintain each ALI record, and for a large enterprise, that simply does not scale as the cost becomes unmanageable.

Often an application is required to manage ALI changes and updates, adding even more complexity and cost to the overall solution. While benefiting the vendors selling ALI solutions, it is bad for organizations trying to manage expenses and keep up with user mobility. If records in the private database are not kept in sync with the public database, the public records become useless to first responders.

With a center that gets 1,000 calls a day, 80% of those may be wireless, half of the remaining may be residential, leaving only 10% from an MLTS [Multi-line telephone system] where ADDRESS LINE 2 is relevant. Out of this, only a handful have meaningful ALI information in that field, so dispatchers concentrate on other data.

Placing a URL in the ADDRESS LINE 2 field allows the organization to create a 'shell record' that points to a location where more meaningful information can be stored. The organization has full control over the content. Updates can be published and refreshed whenever new data exists.

This puts the control of the data back in the hands of the organization and minimizes the reliance on the ALI vendor in the middle and the need to pay their monthly recurring charges. PSAPs can now use the Internet to access the URL for additional data. Some dispatchers are already turning to Google and social media for additional context.

Since the content behind the URL is HTML, any content can be placed there to be delivered to the 911 center, including pictures, maps, floor plans, or even real-time video feeds through a standard proxy. The ideas are limited only by the imagination, and full multimedia collaboration with local police is now possible.

Imagine the following use case:

A man enters a bank branch armed with a shotgun. One of the employees triggers the silent alarm. This triggers a workflow in the network that dynamically creates a webpage with the video feeds in a DMZ area of the network still isolated from the public. A pinhole is opened in the firewall to allow video traffic to the IP address range of the local police network.

The police department receives the alarm and the URL of the webpage previously created. This information is broadcast to responding units on their mobile data terminals. While enroute to the bank, responding units can monitor the progress via video. When SWAT arrives on scene, they use the video information to identify the individual and safely plan their entry into the facility.

The cool part is that this is all functionality available today, using off-the-shelf BYOD hardware and software.

To learn more about E-911 from Fletcher, take a look at some of his recent posts on the Avaya blog, in which he responds to the popular recent John Oliver segment on 911, breaks down NG911, and discusses how 911 awareness can lead to less tragedy.