Seven key E911 issues the FCC ruling glosses over

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Wall Street Article-911 & Cell Phones

Tests Show Many Cellphone Calls
To 911 Go Unlocated
By ANNE MARIE SQUEO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 19, 2005; Page B1

In a windowless room in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., 911
operators answer emergency calls for all of New York City. With
each call, a little white box pops on the operators' personal
computers to say where the call is coming from. At least, that's
how it's supposed to work.

A recent test of the system involving cellular calls found some
unsettling results: In many instances, the information giving the
911 caller's location either didn't appear or was inaccurate. In
fact, none of the major wireless carriers met federally required
thresholds for pinpointing locations of the callers, New York
Police Department officials say.

The Federal Communications Commission ordered cellular
companies almost 10 years ago to begin upgrading their
networks so that they could pinpoint the location of people
using cellphones who call 911, just as they register the location
of landline 911 callers. The system provides critical information
to police and emergency medical crews in case callers are unable
to tell operators where to find them.

The issue has become a greater public-safety concern in a post-
Sept. 11 world as more people use wireless phones, not only
when on the go but increasingly at home as well. Yet pinpointing
the location of a mobile phone at any given time is inherently
more difficult than locating a wired phone linked to a fixed
address. And the technology the carriers are deploying to do this
for cellphones isn't working as well as anticipated.

New York presents special challenges given its dense population
and skyscrapers, but other parts of the country are experiencing
problems as well. Chicago officials also recently notified major
cellular carriers of less-than-acceptable results in tests of their
systems. In that city's South Side, the technology is having
mixed results for all the carriers, says Ronald Bonneau, director
of the emergency dispatch center there.

In the New York City suburbs of Long Island, emergency
operators are finding a lot of wireless 911 calls that come in lack
the necessary latitude and longitude information of the caller
even though the system is capable of receiving that data, says
Matt Jones, the 911 coordinator for Suffolk County, N.Y. He says
he doesn't know why the setup isn't working.

Most people involved in the process say they expected some
hiccups given the technological hurdles to precisely identifying a
cellphone caller's location. But a host of other problems are
plaguing the carrier's efforts, including insufficient funding and
no centralized oversight.

"Since the beginning of the wireless 911 discussion there have
been a lot of expectations that were way above what was
scientifically available," says Jim Nixon, vice president of
government relations for cellphone carrier T-Mobile. He notes
that when the FCC ordered the industry in 1996 to get ready for
911, "none of these technologies existed."

Verizon Wireless, Nextel Communications Inc. and Sprint Corp.
all use the federal government's Global Positioning System
satellites to find 911 callers, with GPS technology built into the
phones. Yet the FCC doesn't mandate that this setup be as
precise as that found on GPS hand-held devices used by hikers
and hunters. The FCC says the cellphone GPS system must
pinpoint a caller to within about 400 feet for 95% of the 911
calls placed over their network -- compared with accuracy as
precise as 10 feet for the hand-held GPS gadgets. Still, none of
the carriers met that looser threshold in the New York test.

Even if the system could identify a cellphone call as coming from
within a 400-foot area, that would still make it difficult for
emergency responders to find a caller in distress, especially in a
big city. "How does that help us in midtown Manhattan?" asks
Capt. Donald Francisco, who heads the NYPD's Office of
Technology and Systems Development. "Run up flights of stairs
and knock on every door?"

The carriers say that various factors including geography,
topography and basic problems afflicting their networks at any
given time can affect how accurate location technologies are.
Verizon Wireless says its own tests in New York City, which
included 7,500 randomly picked locations compared with the
710 used in the city's test, showed its 911 service did meet FCC
requirements, according to Fran Malnati, the carrier's executive
director of regulatory matters. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture
of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC.


Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of SBC Communications Inc.
and BellSouth Corp., and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche
Telekom AG, deploy network-based technologies that use the
location of three cellular transmission towers to triangulate the
location of a 911 caller. That presents problems in areas such as
along waterfronts where towers aren't likely to be facing the
shoreline -- and proved to be a problem in the New York test,
which found some 911 calls placed on the West Side of
Manhattan were picked up by emergency operators across the
Hudson River in neighboring New Jersey.

Similarly, in rural areas, cell towers are often lined up along
roadways with miles between them, making it difficult to get
three tower readings on a caller. The FCC took into account the
less-precise nature of this technology, allowing these carriers to
pinpoint a call within about 900 feet for 95% of calls. (When the
carriers were first adopting location-detection technology any
measurement was considered better than none and the FCC left
the details of what system to use to the carriers.)

To be sure, getting any detailed location information from
wireless 911 callers is a vast improvement over the information
that was available previously, which was a more general area
based on the cellular tower that handled the 911 call. Public-
safety officials can rattle off numerous examples where the new
technology has saved a life. Mr. Bonneau, for example, says the
Chicago system recently used its updated setup to find a man
who went into shock from an allergic reaction on a suburban
forest reserve within 10 minutes.

But the technology's accuracy becomes crucial in cases where
911 callers don't know where they are or aren't able to speak.
And that can be significant, especially in a city the size of New
York. Last year, emergency operators there received 11.8 million
911 calls. Of those, 4.8 million, or about 35%, were made via
cellphone, and for about 22,000 calls the call center used the
new technologies that superimposed the latitude and longitude
coordinates onto a map of the city to find an address.

Federal regulators now are being asked by some public-safety
officials to specify the geographic area -- nationwide, state or
local -- that should be measured to see if carriers meet the
accuracy thresholds previously set. The wireless industry had
argued that measurements should be made on a nationwide
basis, which would average results for cities and rural areas. In a
recent plan filed with the FCC, they backed down and agreed to
statewide measurements. But some public-safety officials argue
this, too, would skew results drastically, allowing areas with
better accuracy rates to mask problems in other places. The
Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials has asked
the FCC to make a determination.

Also in question is how often accuracy tests should be done and
who should pay for them. The testing done for New York by RCC
Consultants Inc., an independent consultant, cost $700,000.
While the city paid for that, the carriers too have done extensive
testing around the country. "To make this a recurring expense
would create tremendous financial hardship," says John Walls, a
spokesman for CTIA -- The Wireless Association, an industry
trade group.

Emergency-call centers "need to have some degree of
confidence" in the data they're getting from the phone
companies, responds George Pohorilak, Connecticut's director of
statewide emergency telecommunications, who is in the process
of testing the major carriers in his state. Otherwise, police, fire
or ambulance workers could lose valuable time responding when
seconds count.

Cellphone calls to 911 aren't the only issue brought about by
new technology. Another concern is the growing number of
people who get home phone service over Internet connections.
After several high-profile emergencies where 911 service didn't
work for Internet-based phones, the FCC is expected to require
today that companies providing this service connect directly to
the emergency 911 system as wireless companies are required
to.

Posted by: BillGribble   Posted on: 05/19/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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