Satellite-Based Calls Shouldn't Be Excluded From Indoor 911 Location Accuracy Measures, CTIA Says

APCO, AT&T, CTIA, the National Emergency Number Association, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon last year proposed a road map for more effective indoor location accuracy, which emphasizes that the advent of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies makes a dispatchable wireless address available where it wasn't in the past (see 1412150061). The FCC approved an NPRM proposing a different set of rules last February (see 1402210038). The carriers recently filed an amended version of the road map at the FCC.

NextNav, which sells its own technology for identifying callers, filed a letter last week that said the FCC was on the right track with its proposed metrics. The draft order on 911 rules offers two metrics -- a “blended metric” taking in all calls to E-911 and “a second metric for location fixes resulting from non-satellite-based technologies (effectively, an indoor benchmark),” NextNav said. Published test results, including results by the FCC Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council, show “the Commission’s non-satellite metric will closely correlate to indoor location accuracy in urban and suburban environments,” the company said.

CTIA fired back in a letter posted Monday in docket 07-114. The non-satellite-based metric “would be significantly and arbitrarily under-inclusive,” CTIA said. Adoption of the metric would be “arbitrary and capricious” and would ignore all of the indoor calls that can be located using the assisted-GPS (A-GPS) technology widely used by carriers, the group said. “With satellite and non-satellite technologies designed in many cases to complement each other, measuring such solutions separately would not advance the objectives in this proceeding.”

Meanwhile, APCO, NENA and CTIA reported on meetings last week with FCC staff, in a second filing posted by them Monday. Representatives of the four major carriers also attended the meetings. The road map signatories “discussed the benefits of the Roadmap, including dispatchable location and the commitment to provide public safety live 9-1-1 call data to track various positioning source technologies and evaluate improved location performance indoors, what some have called a ‘sea-change’ for assessment purposes,” the filing said.

A wireless industry lobbyist who supports the road map said he's guardedly optimistic the FCC will approve it. The more FCC officials understand the commitments in the road map, the more they like it, the industry lawyer said. “The road map contemplates the adoption of aggressive metrics, so that the FCC still plays an important role in making sure that the commitments that are promised in the road map are delivered. And we think those are only enhanced by the additional commitments that were made last week” in the revised document filed at the FCC, the official said.

“If the commission's primary reason for this rulemaking is helping 911 find wireless callers indoors, the final rule must include enforceable accuracy metrics or an enforceable testing regime for indoor calls, or the rule will be meaningless,” said Jamie Barnett, Venable lawyer and former chief of the Public Safety Bureau. Barnett represents the FindMe911 coalition, which has been at odds with road map proponents. “That's why dozens of public safety organizations and thousands of concerned front-line 911 professionals have urged the FCC to include specific and enforceable indoor accuracy requirements in its final rule,” he told us. Carriers, “not surprisingly, hate those indoor requirements, and they are desperately trying to convince the FCC to weaken the rule by substituting a metric that combines indoor and outdoor locations, thus allowing them to meet their obligations all or in part through improved outdoor performance using GPS, GLONASS, the Russian satellite system, or other global position satellite constellations as they become available,” he said.