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.
Ethernet protocols for phone identification don't track softphones, Wi-Fi phones, and cellular phones. A softphone or Wi-Fi phone user could potentially make calls from anywhere: desktop, conference room, shared workspace, cafeteria, home, or public hotspot. Tracking these mobile users' location presents two challenges: Identifying that their location has changed, and updating location mapping databases with the current location.
Fortunately a rapidly growing set of solutions solves many of the location and PSAP call routing challenges. IP telephony vendors, 911 solutions providers such as 9-1-1 Enable, 911 ETC, or RedSky (often in partnership with IP telephony and/or WLAN infrastructure vendors) solve two challenges: dynamically updating location databases and routing outbound 911 calls to the correct PSAP for the user's current location. Actual solutions vary--some are hosted, some are on-premise, and some are managed. Capabilities vary as well based on supported IP telephony and Wi-Fi platforms.
For example, softphone 911 management products maintain real-time location updates for softphones by asking the user to validate or enter their current address if the application detects a change. A "Master Address List" service can provide a drop-down box with pre-populated known user locations, or an external address validation service, to reduce errors from manual entry. PSAP forwarding services intercept the 911 call, look up the current user location information, and forward the call to the correct PSAP. Service providers such as Intrado and Dash (now part of Bandwidth.com) provide this back-end service through the 911 solutions vendors previously mentioned.
While these solutions can provide accurate, real-time location tracking for softphone and Wi-Fi users, tracking locations for cell phone users is still problematic. When a cell user calls 911 they transmit both their own phone number and the location of the cell tower where they are connected. Unfortunately, this location is only accurate to a few hundred feet, and won’t indicate altitude--so while police/fire/rescue might find the building where a 911 caller is located, they can't pinpoint the floor.
Longer term, the NENA (the National Emergency Number Association) proposal for Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG 9-1-1) will enable more accurate location information for cell phone users, but we're still a couple of years away from widespread adoption.
Evaluate the potential of third party solutions to solve some of these 911 challenges while keeping your eye on development of NG 9-1-1. While protecting the health and welfare of employees is the primary driver for a solid 911 strategy, don’t ignore requirements to minimize legal and civil risk.
