No Easy Solution in Sight for Texting to 911
All proposed interim solutions for sending text messages to 911 call centers have “issues and limitations” that restrict their usefulness, 4G Americas warned in a white paper it presented to the FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee Friday. President Chris Pearson of 4G Americas presented the findings at an EAAC meeting.
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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has repeatedly stressed the importance of giving people the ability to send emergency texts to public safety answering points (PSAPs), most recently in a speech to the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials last week (CD Aug 11 p4). He noted the importance of 911 texts to the disabled. The EAAC is developing recommendations to the FCC for a report due later this year (CD July 11 p8).
"It’s a complex issue, there’s no doubt,” Pearson said. “Potential interim techniques have been identified, but they all have limitations, which have to be acknowledged. ... Subscribers need to understand well in advance what these limitations are.” Any interim solution will require “significant resources to develop and deploy,” he said. “We know something needs to be done. We know that it has to be done correctly. We know that it has to be something that’s dependable, reliable, accessible and ready for everybody.”
Video Relay Service and IP-Based Relay Service may offer the most promise, the report said (http://xrl.us/bk8pn9). SMS-based techniques such as National SMS Relay Center also could offer an interim solution. Via the national relay center, SMS messages are sent to a centralized location that would provide a voice connection to the appropriate 911 call center. But all proposals have limitations, the report said: If any of the technologies are adopted, “subscribers will need to be educated that any interim solution will have limitations and restrictions."
SMS to 911 “continues to have serious issues and limitations” and would have “significant impacts to wireless network infrastructure and to the emergency services networks,” the report said. Interim solutions based on real-time text “are not feasible as interim solutions” since they require an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) subsystem and the “IMS subsystem is not widely deployed, is not likely to be deployed on 3G systems, will not be deployed on 2G systems, and is not supported by the mobile devices currently being used by the subscribers,” the report said.
Instant Messaging (IM) as offered by Google, AOL, Yahoo and others also wouldn’t work, the report said. “None of these services currently support emergency messaging so additional development would be required by these third party IM service providers and by the PSAP systems.” Technology based on communications through American Sign Language over video wouldn’t work because PSAP’s aren’t equipped to handle such calls, the report said.