CONSUMER EDUCATION SAID TO BE ESSENTIAL FOR E911 DEPLOYMENT
When contemplating the wireless Enhanced 911 (E911) issue, it’s critical not to ignore the fact that “wireless E911 is at its core a consumer issue,” said Dane Snowden, FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau (CGB) chief. Speaking at the 2nd-day of a 2-day meeting of the FCC’s E911 Coordination Initiative, he said since 1995, the number of 911 calls placed by people using wireless phones had more than doubled to over 50 million per year: “Public safety personnel estimate that about 30% of the many millions of 911 calls they receive daily are placed from wireless phones and that percentage is only growing.”
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The success of E911 in the wireline context has raised consumer expectations, Snowden said: “American consumers are ‘used to’ wireline enhanced 911 -- the automatic transmittal of their location and callback information -- and they expect the same capabilities from their wireless telephones.” He said with the transition of wireless service “from a luxury service to a necessity,” consumer expectation about the features and functions of their wireless phone had increased: “This elevated expectation makes it impossible for consumers to appreciate some of the limitations of wireless phones and wireless E911… Consumers are expecting the wireless phones to work like their hard wired phones in their homes.”
Consumer education is “essential” for successful E911 deployment, as consumers’ “safety may be directly affected by how much they know about wireless E911,” Snowden said: “Because wireless 911 locations information will not be available everywhere immediately, it is important for consumers calling 911 from wireless phones to know the advantages and the limitations they can expect when making that call.” Successful deployment of wireless E911, he said, requires the coordination and cooperation of wireless carriers, local exchange carriers, the pubic safety community, equipment manufacturers and technology vendors.
Snowden said the FCC, through the CGB, was engaged in a “strategic, deliberate and targeted” consumer outreach campaign. He said the Commission was looking at “ways to improve our E911 Web presence and the usefulness of those sites as an informational clearinghouse.” It was also “exploring the possibility of developing an on-line E911 training session to provide information about wireless E911 to specific target audiences to help them understand the differences between the basic 911 and E911, wireline and wireless E911 and the current state of wireless E911 deployment,” Snowden said.
Ind. Wireless E911 Advisory Board Vice Chmn. Ken Lowden said it was important to create an education campaign that would reach consumers who, he said, were “overloaded with information coming from” mass media and therefore often ignored it: “How to fight through the overload of information? The more information is delivered,” the harder it is to get consumers’ attention. He said when first contemplating public outreach campaign in Ind., “I have to admit we were really a little naive on how we were going to do this. We thought just [running] information to the public… was a pretty simple process. I really wish it was that easy.” He said introduction of E911 as a universal emergency number was accomplished by “intense education and enormous effort… Wireless carriers, which find themselves in a very intense competitive market… sell consumers on the warm and fuzzy. This is not a criticism of wireless industry, but rather a reality of the environment.”
Lowden said a “unique ability” of Ind. E911 Wireless Board “to draw attention to our reference” was due to “a state-wide elected official. We are the only state in the U.S. that has an elected official as a chairman of the E911 Wireless Board. Our treasurer continues to make numerous trips throughout the state of Indiana talking about 911.” Lowden said the Wireless Board had also disbursed over $35 million to the public safety answering points (PSAPs) on the phase 1 and phase 2 efforts: “Indiana statute allows specifically for PSAPs to use the money for public awareness and information.” He said as a result, 70 out of 90 counties in Ind. had phase 2 with at least one wireless carrier: “Indiana is certainly on its way to becoming a 100% state of phase 2.”
Commenting on the electronic filing of quarterly reports by wireless carriers on E911 deployment, FCC Wireless Bureau’s Bobby Brown expressed concern that PSAP registries were “overinclusive, meaning that many of the entries we had PSAP ID numbers for were not people that actually took calls. So, that is going to be something that we'll have to resolve.” He also said when filing their electronic reports, many carriers had “trouble with our Excel spread sheet, meaning the specific instructions that we had given were not followed,” requiring the FCC to work on the data manually: “We want to stress that carriers [should] give us the information in the format that we [had requested,] and we are happy to work with them if that’s going to be a problem for them.”
Brown said the FCC hadn’t posted its reports to the Web site because “we are still working on the data making sure that we have accurate and reliable information before we post anything. We need to work with NENA and states to clean up and correct discrepancies.” Responding to a question on whether the FCC was planning to provide data projecting wireless industry growth, FCC Wireless Bureau Special Counsel Lauren Patrich said: “We certainly are in the business of industry analysis… I am not sure if we will ever be in the business of predicting what is going to happen.”