POWELL CITES E911 PHASE 2 ADVANCES, NEED FOR MORE ROLLOUTS

Several participants in the 2nd meeting of the coordination initiative, which kicked off in April, cited remaining E911 challenges, including a need for standardized testing. Nancy Pollock, a Metro 911 Board member in St. Paul, , said another challenge had been cost recovery in the face of the expense of implementing Phase 2: “Many states do not have a cost recovery mechanism for public safety.” In other cases, cost recovery mechanisms might be adequate for 911 landline efforts but don’t take into account the higher costs now associated with wireless E911 rollouts, Pollock said.

“We all believe that parties should not obstruct E911 deployment based on unnecessary delay or procedural gamesmanship at the state or federal level,” Powell said. When the FCC held its first E911 coordination initiative in April, he said 53% of the close to 6,000 PSAPs in the U.S. were receiving Phase 1 E911 data, a figure that now has reached 60%. Phase 1 capabilities let a 911 center locate a caller by cell site but Phase 2 provides the ability to pinpoint a caller as close as 50 meters. Now 20% of PSAPs are receiving location information from at least one carrier, up 5% from 7 months ago, Powell said. For Phase 2 deployment, he said: “In just 2 quarters, we added an additional 355 markets including 900 more PSAPs. There are now more than 1,200 PSAPs across the country that are receiving Phase 2 data from at least one carrier.” Noting that 19 states and D.C. hadn’t implemented Phase 2 anywhere, he said: “This is why we must all double and redouble our efforts so that every mobile phone user can be quickly and accurately located in every region of our nation.”

Upton said of the E911 bill: “It looks like it will be up next week. We have an agreement with the leadership to bring this bill up.” Among other things, the legislation would create a national E911 office, provide $100 million a year in E911 grants to states for the next 5 years and withhold money from states that diverted specially collected 911 surcharges to other uses. “I am hopeful that when we pass this next Tuesday or Wednesday in the House that the Senate will be shortly behind us,” Upton said.

Meanwhile, several forum participants pressed a Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) official on why funds available from DHS’s Office of Domestic Preparedness didn’t explicitly cover E911 readiness. DHS’s Robert Johns said of the funding that 80% must be allocated to local jurisdictions, including the Urban Area Security Initiative. Federal law bars using those funds for construction or renovation of facilities, he said. But the State Homeland Security Program and the Urban Area Security Initiative allows certain kinds of equipment to be funded, so E911 efforts could be funded if they were in conjunction with a state homeland security plan, Johns said. “These programs do not have direct grants for 911 per se,” he acknowledged, saying it would depend on how a state or local govt. defined “allowable equipment” in the context of homeland security.

Several participants expressed frustration that the homeland security connection to E911 upgrades wasn’t more direct, saying there was confusion at the state level about what was allowed under current funds. “There may need to be a discussion with the state homeland security advisers or directors,” one panelist said. Wash. E911 Administrator Robert Oenning said: “We've been trying to figure out how to get around this as an issue of homeland security because in our state, 98% of the time when you call 911 you reach an agency that is not police or fire.” He said other public safety agencies responsible for E911 rollout “feel completely and totally left out of the picture.”

The Assn. of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ Project Locate, which monitors wireless E911 deployment, is to introduce a national consumer awareness program on E911 in early 2004, Pollock said. She said studies showed 70% of wireless 911 users believed the public safety agency receiving their call knew where to find them, although only 10-12% of PSAPs across the country have deployed Phase 2. The campaign will distribute a “911 call card” with information such as what users need to tell emergency dispatchers to provide location data.

In terms of remaining testing challenges in E911 deployment, Pollock said public safety agencies often had to educate emergency dispatchers that caller location data that showed up from one carrier could take a different form when it arrived from another operator. “It’s a huge challenge,” she said. Wireless carriers need such information to be coordinated down to the level of what PSAPs receive, she said.

The issue of location testing guidelines is now before the Emergency Services Interconnection Forum (ESIF), said its chairman, T-Mobile USA’s James Nixon. “The goal is not to develop a single accuracy testing program that must be applied nationally because there’s so many varieties of local factors and different technologies,” he said. The point of the ESIF effort is to identify the “major pieces” of a reliable testing program so each carrier can look at its internal testing regimen and compare it to a list, he said. The point is that testing regimen “would produce reliable, consistent results that PSAPs could be secure in relying on.” The result would be a reliable way to validate location accuracy and a list of terms to describe the pieces of the accuracy testing process, Nixon said.

Transportation Secy. Norman Mineta remains committed to E911 deployment issues, although some of those responsibilities “may be shifting” to the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Div. at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the next several months, EMS Div. Chief Drew Dawson said: “We are working out the details of that.”

Separately, several participants said that aside from the challenges of E911, a just as critical issue was the inability of many multiline phone systems, including PBXs in private businesses, to inform an emergency dispatcher of where a 911 caller was. Gregory Cooke, deputy chief of the FCC Wireline Bureau’s Competition Policy Div., said the agency had requests pending before it to revise its rules so all PBXs were E911-compatible. “There are requests in front of us now to ensure that carriers who have to transport this data are able to do so and actually do transport it to the PSAP,” Cooke said. “Underlying all of this is what do the actual operators have to do to supply this information to the PSAP.” Questions about PBX capabilities for E911 have been kicking around at the FCC since 1994 and were the subject of a 2-day meeting there in 1997. In Dec., it arose again in a further notice to study whether mobile satellite service operators, multiline phone systems, IP telephony providers telematics providers and others should have to meet E911 mandates. Questions raised in the further notice included whether state action had been sufficient to implement 911 and what might be useful model legislation in that area. Between 1997 and now, very few states have enacted legislation in that area, Cooke said. One area of controversy the FCC has to address in this area is whether it has jurisdiction over private entities such as a company that’s operating a PBX. “But there is no controversy that states have jurisdiction,” he said. The National Emergency Number Assn. and APCO have drafted model state legislation that helps address those issues, such as whether companies with older equipment should be grandfathered in to new requirements, he said.

“Location has been a problem on multiline telephone systems for the 911 community since 911 began,” Pollock said. “We have been dealing with this for 20 years and I think we have been negligent, frankly, in not being more vociferous about the problem. We have sort of allowed this to happen.” This has been before the FCC since 1994, she said: “I think it’s time we do something about it.” NENA and APCO had decided a “balanced approach” would work best, with states passing legislation that addressed the local public policy part and the FCC dealing more with Part 68 requirements that covered PBX equipment, NENA Wireless Implementation Dir. James Goerke said.