Carriers, Find Me Coalition, Exchange Blows on Proposed 911 Road Map
Ex-FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett sharply criticized a proposed road map for ensuring indoor location accuracy for calls to 911, during a webinar Monday on behalf of the Find Me 911 Coalition. The plan was unveiled last month by APCO, AT&T, National Emergency Number Association, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon (see 1411190064). The industry road map offers the best path to a relatively quick solution, said Steve Sharkey, T-Mobile senior director, Monday in a blog post.
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In February, the FCC proposed standards that would require carriers to locate 911 callers inside a building within 50 meters (55 yards) for 67 percent of calls within two years of the adoption of final rules and for 80 percent within five years (see 1402210038).
Barnett, now at Venable, said the road map is much weaker than the standard proposed by the FCC. “They’re hard requirements and they’re simple and easy to understand,” he said. The compromise plan “shifts attention to dispatchable address” while it delays and weakens proposed benchmarks, requiring carriers to be able to locate 40 percent of all callers, not indoor calls, within two years and 50 percent within three, he said. The plan puts all its emphasis on Wi-Fi because carriers “don’t have another solution for indoors, or a good one,” Barnett said. Carriers know “this whole process will take years and years, while we do without real indoor location accuracy,” he said.
The coalition was initially funded by TruePosition, which offers an alternative for location wireless 911 calls, Barnett acknowledged. He said APCO and NENA signed off on the road map but other public safety groups have not and were frozen out in discussions of the proposed road map.
CTIA fired back at Barnett. “Jamie Barnett and his vendor client TruePosition are at it again: presenting public safety professionals with misinformation, false choices and scare tactics designed to thwart viable solutions that more than satisfy the FCC’s core objective,” said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs. “Mr. Barnett’s ‘webinar’ disserves consumers and public safety first responders by seeking to undermine the aggressive timelines proposed by APCO, NENA and the four national carriers to deliver dispatchable location technology that first responders have recognized is the ‘gold standard’ to find 911 callers in need.”
The road map sets a new course for industry, Sharkey wrote. “It leverages existing technologies, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, to deliver an indoor caller’s ‘dispatchable location’ -- physical address including information such as floor, suite, or apartment -- to the" public safety answering point, he said. “This allows public safety to benefit from the enormous resources that are continually invested in the ever-expanding commercial communications ecosystem.” The road map will mean a quicker solution than the proprietary technologies “hyped by some vendors,” he said.