NRIC Subcommittee Falls Short on E911 Agreement
A Network Reliability & Interoperability Council (NRIC) group trying to develop a consensus position on enhanced 911 (E911) geographic area requirements conceded Mon. that efforts have fallen short. The chmn. of the group said during a NRIC meeting at FCC hq he would ask NRIC to ask the FCC for another 60 days to try to reach a compromise.
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Edmond Thomas, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering & Technology, said the Commission hasn’t decided whether a stay makes sense given the level of apparent disagreement. Sources said after the meeting the subgroup with NRIC is sharply divided with carriers and the public safety community taking different stances on the issue. “The process has sort of broken down,” one source said. The Assn. for Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) asked the FCC in Oct. to step in and define the geographic area over which a wireless carrier must provide the levels of 911 location accuracy specified by FCC rules.
Commission rules say that carriers using a handset- based E911 solution must be accurate within 100 meters for 67% of calls and within 300 meters for 95% of calls. But the FCC hasn’t defined the relevant area over which this accuracy is to be measured. “If you measure that over a carrier’s service area you average it so that you can have some areas with terrible accuracy that are offset by areas with a good average,” a public safety source observed: “The PSAPs [public safety answering points] would prefer to average it within their PSAP so that if they get an 911 call it is in fact accurate to the degree required by the rules. That may not be practical and the carriers don’t want to do it.”
“It’s a big issue,” said Robert Gurss, APCO dir.- legal & govt. affairs. “The whole idea was to give us accuracy within 50 or 100 meters… There’s been a lot of very substantial disagreement.” Steve Seitz, dir.-govt. affairs for the National Emergency Number Assn., agreed the FCC may need to clarify its intentions on the accuracy requirements.
Darold Whitmer of Intrado, chmn. of the task group on accuracy testing, acknowledged the group has been unable to reach a decision and asked for more time. “We had starting points,” Whitmer said. “We had various options that we looked at, but unfortunately we couldn’t bring all of these groups together to reach a consensus to bring back to the council.” Whitmer said the group has made some progress: “We're not still at extreme polar opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Thomas asked Whitmer during the meeting whether a delay was likely to result in a compromise. “We take APCO very, very seriously,” Thomas told us. “The real issue is if we believe at the end of the day this subgroup comes up with something really valuable. We've got to think about it and probably check a little more with the subgroup. The most definitive thing I can tell you is the jury is still out.” Thomas added: “Basically they've been working now for a very long time and they still haven’t gotten closure. They say they're making progress. I just wanted to judge how much progress.”