Wireless 911 Carriers See a Sharp Drop in Phase II Location Information in California, CalNENA Says
Major cities in California have seen a significant decrease in the number of wireless 911 calls with Phase II location information to public safety answering points (PSAP), CalNENA President Danita Crombach wrote the FCC (http://bit.ly/16fN2Dy). The Public Safety Network on the association’s behalf collected data from Bakersfield, Pasadena, San Francisco, San Joe and Ventura County to determine how often carriers managed to get Phase II location information, and they included this information in the report to the FCC (http://bit.ly/1eHfFIU). Phase I data includes only the location of the cell site with a phone number, but the geographic area can be huge, Crombach wrote Monday. In San Francisco, “as many as 80 percent of mobile calls are coming as Phase I only and the rest are Phase II,” said Lisa Hoffmann, San Francisco Department of Emergency Management deputy director, in an interview Tuesday.
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The National Emergency Number Association’s California chapter, CalNENA wants the FCC to enforce existing regulations that require the delivery of caller location with wireless 911 calls, Crombach told us. “We want the FCC to take action to make information delivery prompt and to fulfill indoor accuracy requirements,” she said. “We are hoping that this will prompt the carriers to do whatever it takes to deliver Phase II accurate communications information in a timely manner.” AT&T, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile (which has since combined with MetroPCS) and Verizon Wireless were evaluated in the survey. AT&T had the sharpest losses in Phase II from 92 percent in January 2008 to 31 percent in December 2012, the report found. “The safety of our customers is a top priority for AT&T and we are thoroughly reviewing CalNENA’s filing,” said an AT&T spokesman.
Statewide data from the California State 911 Office found less than 45 percent of the 1,590,000 wireless 911 calls received statewide in March were delivered with Phase II data, said CalNENA in a news release (http://bit.ly/1cxObKh). “We get calls from the State 911 Office switch that transmits 911 data, and as with all other PSAPs, our goal is to get the people” that can help the caller to the person “as quickly as possible,” said Hoffmann in an interview. “This can slow down the response time, because we have to spend more time trying to figure out where the caller is if we don’t get Phase II information.” Phase II information is important to anyone who depends on 911 service for any type of emergency, said NENA CEO Brian Fontes in an interview. “Any investigation of why there has been this decline will lead to constructive resolutions so that consumers can be expected to be located within reason when they make 911 calls.” Hoffmann said the analytics are only working with 80 percent accuracy in San Francisco. “We should be trending higher as technology improves, but we are trending down,” he said: That’s “why we are asking the question to the FCC."
Wireless 911 callers in Ventura County have “no better than a one in three chance that first responders will know where they are located,” wrote Crombach. In urban areas of the state, wireless 911 callers may have “no better than a one in five chance of their location being discovered with their call to first responders,” she said. Seventy percent of 911 calls nationwide are placed from mobile phones, Crombach said: This data “drives home the risk we are facing today as a large and growing percentage of those callers have their location unavailable to dispatchers and emergency responders due to the decline in the delivery of accurate location data with wireless 911 calls.” Fontes said the carriers will need to respond to these issues. “These types of data that CalNENA presented sheds the spotlight on an issue that is critically important and I'm sure that carriers will have explanations,” he said. “I hope they will have resolutions so we can get back on course so the public has access to 911 wireless devices with a degree of certainty that they will be located.” (sfriedman@warren-news.com)