911 Road Map Seen Unlikely to Get FCC's Nod Without Changes

The FCC can find a middle ground, said a spokesman for the Find Me 911 Coalition, which is funded by TruePosition, which offers an alternative for location wireless 911 calls. “The Roadmap isn't a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and commissioners don't have to accept all of its terms just because the carriers proposed them,” emailed the spokesman. “Put another way, the commission can protect the strong benchmarks of the NPRM, while cherry picking any other elements it likes from the Roadmap to supplement those requirements.”

The road map offers advantages that couldn’t be achieved through the February FCC proposal, said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs. “The road map meets the FCC’s long-term goal of dispatchable location and its proposed 50-meter location accuracy metric, as well as capture key demands from public safety after months of negotiations,” he said. “It reflects an aggressive, yet feasible, framework to yield the most accurate information for first responders that carefully combines speed of deployment and the increased performance of a dispatchable location solution.” If policymakers “unravel” the balance achieved in the plan, it would “harm efforts to bring improved location accuracy to consumers and public safety,” he said. “By contrast, none of the other proposed vendor solutions demonstrated the ability to meet the FCC's proposed requirements, and do not provide a dispatchable location to public safety answering points.” Bergmann said CTIA remains optimistic other stakeholders will recognize the value of the plan.

“No one should be surprised if the FCC changes the proposal,” said an industry lawyer who counsels wireless industry clients. “In fact, it’s quite rare for the agency to take an industry proposal and adopt it wholesale. That’s just not in the DNA. They almost always change it up -- anywhere from major changes to mere tweaks.” A former FCC legal adviser who doesn't represent public safety or wireless clients said the proposed order puts Chairman Tom Wheeler in a tough spot. “It’s one thing when public safety is united in a cause,” the lawyer said. “But when the APCO’s of the world are at odds with first responders, there is no good road map. The chairman is ultimately going to have to put his head down and do what he thinks is right, because at least one of those constituencies is going to be disappointed.”

A public safety official who supports the road map said it was intended to address FCC desires that key public safety groups work together on a plan that would improve location accuracy. “It’s unclear whether the commission will add to it, subtract from it whatever,” the former FCC official said. “If everyone had agreed to it, the commission’s job probably would have been a lot easier.”

NARUC said the FCC February proposal is superior to the road map. “At a minimum, it is clear the Roadmap simply does not provide the same near-term improvements as the FCC’s original proposal. Instead of those improvements, the Roadmap references services and technologies that may be developed,” NARUC said. NARUC cited as one example that under the FCC proposal in two years, 67 percent of all indoor wireless calls must be located with a horizontal accuracy of 50 meters. “In the same time frame -- two years -- the Roadmap will require only 40 percent of ALL (both indoor and outdoor) calls to be located with similar accuracy."

Also in the latest batch of filings, 16 public interest groups, led by Public Knowledge, raised privacy concerns about the proposal, particularly on the National Emergency Address Database (NEAD) that would be created to keep track of callers. “The proposed establishment and existence of the NEAD is deeply concerning because NEAD would collect and retain sensitive information,” the groups said. Subscribers “likely do not expect that information about their device and physical address will be stored in a national database that is accessible to multiple parties,” the filing said. Bad actors could potentially obtain a user’s media access control (MAC) address if it's stored in a national database, the groups said.

Nothing in the road map states that the database “will be secure, used only for E911 purposes, and never sold to or otherwise shared with third parties, including government entities,” the Public Knowledge-led groups said. The filing also questioned the expanded use of beacon technology proposed in the road map. “Once new beacons are deployed, they may be used to improve location accuracy not only of E911 services, but also of other services, including commercial services, that rely on the same technology,” the groups said. “This is concerning because consumers are highly protective of information about their location.”

The Competitive Carriers Association said it's exploring a similar agreement with public safety for smaller carriers. Parts of the road map should be tweaked to address unique problems in rural areas, CCA said. “Since smaller carriers were not a part of the discussions that led to the present Roadmap, these carriers did not have the opportunity to address how certain aspects of the Roadmap will disproportionately affect them.” Two big questions are whether small carriers will have handset availability and the resources to deploy voice-over-LTE as quickly as their larger counterparts, CCA said. “The test bed and live call data regimes detailed in the Roadmap can be improved to allow for more meaningful participation by smaller carriers, which likely do not hold spectrum licenses in the limited live call data markets, much less the single test bed market.”

CTIA defended the plan. The road map “sets forth a path to rapidly improve both indoor and outdoor location accuracy for wireless 9-1-1 calls,” CTIA said in a filing. “Through tangible and near-term carrier commitments, it attains the Commission’s longer term goal of dispatchable location and its proposed 50-meter location accuracy nearly as quickly as the Third Further Notice’s more limited geographic coordinate proposals.”

The road map was “developed and embraced by the nation’s most respected public safety organizations” and is a “meaningful and substantive alternative to the unworkable rules proposed earlier this year” by the FCC, Verizon said. It allows E-911 location technology “to improve on a parallel track with commercial technologies,” Verizon added.

T-Mobile said by making use of commercial Location Based Services (cLBS), the plan offers a “paradigm shift” for wireless emergency communications. “Instead of relying on technologies that, for the most part, were designed only for E911 and are unlikely to develop and improve over time, the Roadmap incorporates a wide range of solutions, including cLBS technologies that will see continual, dynamic, market-driven improvements,” T-Mobile said. Cisco also endorsed the road map. “It is a better plan than the proposed rules on which to move forward for location accuracy, particularly for indoor locations,” Cisco said.

But the Find Me 911 Coalition noted that despite APCO and NENA support, first responders on the ground overwhelmingly oppose the plan. The group said it polled 328 managers and employees of public safety answering points at the end of November. “By a 10-1 margin, respondents said they would have rejected the phone company plan (76 percent to 8 percent), if it had been put to a vote,” the coalition said.