PSAPs Could See Benefits from Federal Spending on Broadband

“There’s incredible diversity when we speak about PSAPs,” Rohde said. “If you go down to the PSAP here in the District of Columbia you'll see one of the most sophisticated call centers in the world. They've done tremendous things. … And then you can go to other parts of the country and you can see PSAPs that are really, really struggling.” The National Emergency Number Association conducted an informal survey of its members last year that found only about half have a broadband connection, and many that do haven’t integrated it into their system to help them take calls more effectively, he said.

But Rohde said help could be on the way as a result of funds approved by Congress as part of the $7 billion for broadband in the economic stimulus law approved by Congress earlier this month. “We've never had an event like this occur before,” said Rohde, a former NTIA administrator. “We have a tremendous opportunity right now.”

Rohde said USF funds also could potentially be used to help PSAPs as the commission examines revised universal service rules. “As the commission looks at the universal service system we can certainly look toward the role that that can play in addressing some of these fundamental network issues and deployment issues if we truly want to have a ubiquitous 911 system in this country that is able to make this leap into the next generation,” he said.

The summit examined E-911 and VoIP 911 issues the FCC was directed to study by Congress in the NET 911 Act, approved last year. Wednesday’s meetings examined requirements for more robust 911 systems, call-handling in the event of call-overflow from network outages, PSAP certification and testing requirements, determination of geographic coverage areas for PSAPs, validation procedures for inputting and updating location information, and formats for delivering address information to PSAPs. The FCC plans a second summit in May or June to examine related issues, agency officials said. “Some of these issues have a reasonable expectation of improvement and some of them don’t,” predicted Roger Hixson, director of technical issues at NENA.

“How do you handle the different quality of service of a VoIP call versus a wireless call versus a wireline call, which come in at the same point to the selective routers?” asked Drew Dawson, director of the Office of Emergency Medical Services for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. “We are dealing with PSAPs that are extremely advanced, as well as those that are just beginning to get Internet access and it’s a tremendously diverse world we have to deal with.”

On the issue of hardening 911 systems, experts agreed that the weak link today is often the last mile connection between the PSAP and the central office.

“The best practices are pretty well documented. … We know what were supposed to be doing,” said Pete Eggimann, chairman of NENA’s operations committee. “The best practice would be to have dual selective routers serving any PSAP that does exist in some parts of the country but it’s not widely available.” In the last mile connection “there’s very little diversity,” he said. “We're limited by the amount of money that’s available and the facilities that exist in any given area.”

“We have over time evolved toward dual selective routers,” said Doug Jones, director of corporate technology at Verizon. “The weakest link would be the last mile from the central office that serves the PSAP to the PSAP itself. That is a funding issue. … Inside of the network we've got a pretty good record.”

On the issue of determining geographic coverage areas for PSAPs, important in making sure calls get through to the correct emergency operator, Hixson noted that in some areas 911 authorities have yet to put geographic systems in place for VoIP. “As one person I talked to about this put it, ‘we send the commercial map out to the PSAP manager of the 911 authority and if we didn’t get the boundary quite right we asked them to use a crayon to correct it,'” he said. “That’s what actually happens in some cases.”

Stephen Meer, chief technology officer at Intrado, said “like so many things in 911 there’s a wide gamut of effectiveness” among systems. Some systems do a good job and have a staff to share information. “There are other places where they're struggling to make sure there’s somebody on duty to answer the phone, let alone deal with all the administrative work of keeping a 911” map, he said: “There are lots and lots of shape files and they have to dovetail very nicely and they have to fit together and there can be no ambiguity or overlap or gaps between them.”

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, filling in for acting Chairman Michael Copps, said 911 improvement remains a top priority of the commission. “It is my strong belief, and that of my colleagues here as well, that every person who makes a 911 call should be able to reach a public safety agency when they call for help,” he said in opening remarks at the summit. “We will certainly listen very carefully to everything you have to say. We're going to put it in a format that can best be utilized by 911 systems throughout the country as they move to implement new technologies.”

Jeffery Goldthorp, chief of the Public Safety Bureau’s Communications Systems Analysis Division, said that 30 years ago, the U.S. had a “relatively straightforward 911 system” based on the PSTN. “Location information was relatively static,” he said. “Databases did not change very often, people were not moving their phones around. The technology was stable.” But then in the 1990s, the system had to address the move to wireless which made 911 more difficult since callers were not at a fixed address. “There had to be a way to track the device and to do that in such a way that the systems that PSAPs interfaced with were the same,” he said. “It wasn’t easy. It took a long time. But by and large it’s done and it works.”

But addressing emergency calls made using VoIP phones offers a new set of challenges, Goldthorp said. “The larger issue, maybe, is the fact that the underlying network technology has profoundly changed,” he said. “Now you have underlying IP technology. … There need to be gateways to interconnect that network fabric with the legacy 911 routing infrastructure that is in place today.”