9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal. By  Jason Kincaid at  TechCrunch.

Last night I got word that my parents had witnessed a tragic accident while driving in Northern California. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say one person was killed and others were left bleeding, in various states of unconsciousness. Thank God my parents were not hurt in the accident, but they witnessed it first hand, as well as the disturbing aftermath.

Immediately after the accident, my parents and other witnesses began trying to dial 9-1-1. Attempt after attempt resulted in a busy signal. This isn’t unusual in the event of an emergency, as multiple dialers often tie up the lines to report the same incident. Except it seems that nobody managed to get through for far too long: emergency personal didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. The first officer to arrive at the scene said it took him two minutes to get there from the time he got the call. Which means that it took approximately 18 minutes for the news to reach him in the first place.

During a conversation with my father following the accident, he said one of the most profound things I’ve heard since I arrived in Silicon Valley: “Why is it that I can pull out my cell phone and call France or browse the Internet whenever I want, but I got a busy signal for 9-1-1 for 20 minutes?” I wish I had an answer for him.

In the United States, we’re taught from a very young age to call 9-1-1 whenever there’s an emergency. Something bad happens, you call that number, and someone on the other line will be there to help you. Getting a busy signal after dialing 9-1-1 is the closest thing you can have to a mental null set. It doesn’t compute.

But it’s apparently happening more often than most people would believe. A recent report in the Sacramento Bee says that more than 26% of all wireless calls to 911 in California are “abandoned” — in other words, more than a quarter of the people calling 911 hang up in frustration before they even get to talk to someone. In a world where we can interact with people across the world at a moment’s notice, I just don’t understand how one of the things we’ve always taken for granted can fail so miserably.

Now, I’ll be totally upfront and admit that I know relatively little about the way 911 dispatchers work. I am sure that the incident can be fully explained by a lack of staffing at the CHP center that routed the call, or maybe the fact that the accident occurred near a county line caused some jurisdiction issues. I don’t know what the reason was. But as far as I’m concerned, the discussion shouldn’t get that far. This is the kind of problem that we shouldn’t have allowed to form in the first place. It’s as if we’ve forgotten the fundamental reason why most of us keep cell phones with us at all times: to keep each other safe.

At its core, this is more a political issue than a purely technological problem: more money needs to be routed to the right places. But at the same time, there’s no denying that technology plays an important role here — the call routing systems could probably be made more efficient. Calling filters could be improved. Perhaps the system could detect when multiple phones were calling from the same area and inform callers that an accident had already been reported. Whatever the answer, things need to change. And given how upset we get over homepage redesigns and SMS fees, why not exhibit a bit of outrage when technology fails us in a matter of life or death?

In other words – the 9-1-1 system(s) in question are failing a basic test of network robustness: insufficient capacity/redundancy. Here’s a brief refresher on networks:

Several chapters of Paul Baran’s work at the RAND corporation, “On Distributed Communications,” which I understand to be the earliest articulation of the notion that redundant networks could be self-repairing and therefore highly resistant to attack, are available on the RAND website as Acrobat documents. Link to a list of available publications; and here’s a short bio from RAND:

An electrical engineer by training, Paul Baran worked for Hughes Aircraft Company’s systems group before joining RAND in 1959. While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet’s underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.

Since the early 1970s as an entrepreneur and private investor, Baran has founded or co-founded several high-tech telecommunications firms. He is currently chairman and co-founder of Com21, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of cable TV modems for high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet access. He is also a co-founder of the Institute for the Future. Baran holds several patents and has received numerous professional honors including an honorary doctorate from his alma mater Drexel University (BS ‘49). He has a master’s degree in engineering from UCLA.

An excellent article – really a “must-read” for people who care about these issues – and to make sense of what Irwin Redlener has called “the immense mass of interlocking details” is “Expecting the Unexpected: The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy,” by W. David Stephenson and Eric Bonabeau, in the on-line journal Homeland Security Affairs.