RURAL CARRIERS URGE RELIEF ON E911, CITING TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES

“The FCC’s Phase 2 deadlines may be inadvertently jeopardizing rural Americans’ access to reliable wireless phone service and emergency response services,” said Kyle Gruis, senior network operations dir., Rural Cellular. “These deadlines are forcing small carriers to spend their limited capital in E911 Phase 2 that we feel is really incapable of providing us the accurate location information that we need.”

The Commission in April kicked off the initiative to examine E911 implementation issues. FCC Chmn. Powell said Wed. the 2nd meeting was notable because it brought together state E911 representatives. In recent months, he had expressed concern that not every state governor or tribal organization had designated an E911 representative, a problem he said now had been fixed. The meeting focused on public safety answering point (PSAP) deployment efforts, funding gaps, planned commercial deployments of location technology and upcoming legislation.

Many rural carriers already have asked the FCC for relief from various accuracy and reliability standards for Phase 2. Earlier this month, the Commission adopted an order that gave small rural wireless carriers time to demonstrate difficulties in meeting E911 requirements, creating a 6-month process for carriers with fewer than 500,000 subscribers to make a case to the Commission. But the order warned carriers that they would face a heavy burden when seeking any further stay of E911 obligations, given the strong public interest benefits of locating wireless emergency callers.

Several officials with rural wireless operators stressed Thurs. their problems in meeting FCC accuracy requirements with existing technology. Jerry Wilke of Minn.-based Hickory Tech Wireless said his analog TDMA firm had spent $1 million so far on E911 deployment but when it attempted to launch the service, it discovered 50% of the PSAPs covered weren’t ready to receive the location information. Now 10 of 12 PSAPs are running on Phase 2, he said. Wilke said remaining challenges included lack of consumer awareness in Minn. and dispatcher training. “I don’t think consumers know this even exists in Minnesota yet,” he said.

A gap in dispatcher training also created problems for setting up Phase 2 tests to make sure the system was working properly, he said. Preliminary results on the accuracy of the system have been inconclusive and so far have fallen short of FCC standards, Wilke said: “We are about 20 percent off.” One problem is that no GSM handsets with location capability are available, he said.

Allen Holder, dir. of the Lincoln City, W.Va., PSAP, said a CDMA carrier in his rural county was using a handset- based E911 solution and a larger TDMA carrier was using a network-based solution. In his county alone, the accuracy rate of the network-based solution was only about 10%, Holder said. “I am crossing my fingers for when those handsets are developed. It may be a long time before we see the accuracy with a network-based solution that we want.”

Several participants from very rural counties said they faced particular challenges in Phase 2 deployment because some carriers had only a single tower site, making it difficult to triangulate to pinpoint wireless emergency callers. Jackie Mines of Qwest said many of the PSAPs in Qwest’s 13 states had been among the first to conduct trials of E911 service, but she acknowledged that PSAPs in very rural areas faced unique challenges. “Quite simply we know it breaks down to funding and the costs of deploying in those states,” she said: “Our states are characterized by small populations and large geographic areas.”

One common theme among many of the rural officials was the dilemma they faced between choosing network-based location technology that was available now for TDMA and GSM networks but might not hit required accuracy levels for rural areas and handset-based solutions that weren’t yet available in commercial volumes to meet FCC deadlines. “In particular, the rural operators that are operating TDMA networks are somewhat singled out in this regard because there is no handset-based solution available for TDMA analog carriers,” Rural Cellular’s Gruis said on a panel moderated by Comr. Adelstein. “We feel that the investment in the network-based Phase 2 equipment is prohibitively expensive and in rural markets it’s just not showing the accuracy that we need.” Gruis said that didn’t mean network-based location technology couldn’t work well in more densely populated areas. “In the middle of nowhere, it’s just tough to get those triangulations out there.” In Vt., the carrier has invested $2 million to reach an interim FCC milestone of 50% population coverage, he said. Based on vendor reports, the system has shown accuracy rates of a call’s being pinpointed within 100 meters of a caller 26% of the time and within 300 m 20% of the time, which is far less than FCC requirements, Gruis said.

Several participants expressed frustration that in some cases carriers were falling behind in location accuracy requirements even though they were taking FCC-mandated steps to install E911 systems. In the case of Rural Cellular in Vt., “they have done everything right and the accuracy just isn’t there,” said Evelyn Bailey of Vt.’s E911 Board.

As for handset availability, Qualcomm Govt. Relations Dir. Jonas Neihardt said Vodafone was expected to make handsets available with Assisted-GPS location capability over GSM networks in the next 6 months in significant volumes. Virtually all the new products coming through the CDMA pipeline now include A-GPS, he said. Their cost on the CDMA platform has been reduced to about 70 cents per handset, he said. “It was substantially more expensive at the beginning of that process,” but Moore’s Law is allowing the cost of adding this to the chipset to start to become a “nominal expense.” He said: “Eventually, that’s what’s going to happen to the GSM side, too.”