In Stucknation: 911 Off the Hook, WNYC’s Bob Hennelly outlines the current problems – basic problems – with the nation’s 911 emergency telephone reporting/dispatch systems in coping with the proliferation of mobile phones:
Almost a decade after the attacks of September 11th the nation’s most essential emergency local lifeline — 911 — remains a local patchwork of antiquated technology vulnerable to failure when people need it most.
In 2010 the Congressional Research Service, CSR, reported the nation’s underlying 911 local call systems “operate exclusively on an analog technology using an architecture of circuits and switches” that date back to when ATT was the “regulated monopoly providing most of the nation’s phone service.”
That monopoly was broken up in 1984, 27 years ago. As we know, digital technology and cell phones have been dominant for years.
Yet even now, CSR finds 911 systems across the country are “unable to accommodate the latest advances in telecommunications technology and are increasingly out-dated, costly to maintain, and in danger of failure.”
Consider the tragic case of the Virginia Tech students in 2007 caught up in that grisly mass shooting. Many thought they could text 911. They could not. And yet even today the overwhelming number of Americans cannot text 911. The college kids must have thought that surely, by 2007, the grown-ups would have figured out how to make that possible and made it happen.
The most recent case of 911 analog dysfunction in a digital world was not tripped off by a lone gunman or terrorist attack — it was a snow storm.
FCC spokesman Robert Kenny confirms that during the December 26 East Coast blizzard, federal regulators got reports of 911 system problems with dropped cell calls up the I-95 corridor from Virginia into New England. That same storm hit the New York City’s 911 system hard, with frustrated callers reporting busy signals and recorded messages asking them to stay on hold.
Last year, two thirds of all 911 calls were made from cell phones. And it was only last year — after years of industry wrangling — that the FCC began making rules with teeth that require cell carriers to reliably provide 911 networks with basic data such as the origin of emergency calls and the physical location of the caller.
But as the mass migration of 911 callers to cell service occurred the existing system of 911 call center technology was increasingly unprepared to handle it.
“When Americans call 911 from their landlines, first responders receive location information that’s accurate more than 98 percent of the time,” wrote FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. “When Americans call 911 from their mobile phones first responders are about 50 percent less likely to receive precise information about your location.”.
“The inaccuracy is not just a few feet, but up to one or two miles — and sometimes no location information at all,” warns Genachowski. His statement came on the occassion of the FCC rulemaking just last year that mandates the cell industry roll out their upgrades with accountability over an eight-year period.
Even now, New York City’s FDNY ends up in isolated cases dispatching units to a cell tower instead of where the actual fire emergency is.
Meanwhile, at the state level, several states have been raiding the 911 phone tax cookie jar as the system falls farther and farther behind.
For years New York State has been diverting hundreds of millions of dollars intended for improving the state’s 911 Emergency call systems to its general fund.
You can read the entirety of Bob Hennelly’s Stucknation: 911 Off the Hook on WNYC’s new and thus-far brilliant venture, “It’s a Free Country.” [http://itsafreecountry.org/]
If I understand the politics of this issue – rather than directly making telecom providers responsible for all or part of the emergency communications system – by way of democratic process, we’ve added a tax. Which is to say – the democratic process approved an excise tax in order to support 911 systems – and state officials – sworn to uphold the laws of their respective states – took those funds and diverted them to other purposes. In my world, we have several words and phrases which describe this behavior: defalcation, diversion of funds, embezzlement. If the diversion of funds in any way personally benefits the officials in question it becomes – in one flavor or another – theft.
This rather outrageous situation is well covered by Hennelly’s overview of the issue. But it’s an overview. Until we get past the basic issues of funds diversion, and making 911 systems able to receive messages in whatever format (email, SMS, mobile voice duplex and simplex, and, of course, POTS. ((Plain Old Telephone Service – that is, the copper-wire instruments most of us grew up with – which, thankfully, still works most of the time.)) The next level is to use 911 systems as a real-time intelligence collation and distribution system – again, using all available modes – to give information to the public as people call in.
On September 11, 2001, many people died because, having called 911 from the World Trade Center, 911 operators, following instructions, told them to stay put. And so they did.
It’s unlikely that we will solve the complex problems emergency communications when government officials divert dedicated funds; if we can’t break this pattern, it’ll be entirely up to community-based organizations to provide comms in emergencies. The best situation is both: a good system run by the government and telcos, working in cooperation with community-based groups, particularly the ham radio community, most of all the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) ((Wikipedia Link.)) and Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) ((Wikipedia link. ))