Wireless 911 Location Accuracy Remains Challenge for 911 Call Centers

Furth told us he has heard many of those same concerns from 911 officials. “This is a hard transition,” he said. “The 911 system has so many different moving parts and so many different stakeholders and it’s not the kind of system that can be changed overnight. These are all challenges. But I still see an awful lot of progress that has been made.” In the end, 911 isn’t about technology, but “people handling dire emergencies and being able to respond effectively to that,” he said. “I think I have the easiest job in the world compared to what your average call taker has to do every day.”

Furth said regulation has a role to play but anything the FCC does on 911 “we have to do in partnership with the entities we regulate, but also a lot of entities we don’t regulate.” The FCC has to take into consideration state and local government agencies in charge of the public safety answering points (PSAPs) and 911, he said: “Regulation can play a role, but we also have to be careful not to assume that there is a regulatory answer to every question.”

Furth said 911 location accuracy is “near to our hearts and to APCO and its members.” But Furth also said a tour of the show floor shows technology is evolving. “The 2015 order set for a framework for a number of things that are now in process to improve location accuracy for wireless calls,” he said. The order set new benchmarks for accuracy, addressed dispatchable location and required that carriers provide information on the altitude of the caller, the so-called z-coordinate or z-axis, Furth noted.

CTIA filed a recent report at the FCC on technology by two vendors on z-axis location, Furth said. “I’m not going to talk about the proposal, we’re still reviewing it,” he said. “I think you can expect that the commission will be asking for comment. … It’s a major development in the evolution of location-accuracy rules.” The FCC also imposed other standards for accuracy that kick in in 2020 and 2021, he noted.

The z-axis report said tests “provide helpful data, but it also notes that significant questions remain about performance and scalability for live 9-1-1 call environments,” said a filing by CTIA in docket 07-114. “While the Report is not intended to support a comparison of the tested solutions, each of the two vendors’ solutions stopped short of testing in a comprehensive manner. Thus key questions remain as to how and whether the results can be replicated and deployed ubiquitously in real world production and live 9-1-1 call environments.”

The 2015 order states what "is the minimum that the carriers must do,” Furth said. “Our hope and our expectation [is] that the carriers will more than just achieve that minimum, that they will in effect push for more accuracy than the rules require.” Carriers also launched, at the direction of the FCC, the National Emergency Address Database, he said. “They’re starting to populate it with data. I think that we will. in the next couple of years. start to see actual dispatchable location in response to some of the calls that come into PSAPs.” There has been “a lot of technological progress” both by the carriers and vendors, “some of whom are here on the exhibit floor.”

Furth referred specifically to Apple’s new technology, RapidSOS, which will help 911 operators more precisely locate callers (see 1806180003). “One of the exciting things for us … is how much energy is going into the improvement of location technology,” he said. “We think our rules are driving that, but I think the good news here is that the technology is ahead of the rules.”

An industry panel at APCO also focused on the latest on location accuracy. At AT&T “we have focused on getting the best location available,” said Joe Marx, assistant vice president-federal regulatory. “What we end up doing is taking the full amount of time, it ends up being like 22 seconds on the handset, to determine the location.” But RapidSOS and West, another 911 technology company, have shown there's “a lot of value” in obtaining that information more quickly for the PSAPs, he said. Apple and Google have shown “there’s the ability to get excellent location with improvement in speed if you focus more on the quality of the locate,” Marx said.

AT&T has certified compliance with the 2017 and 2018 metrics for location accuracy and is “well exceeding those benchmarks,” Marx said. “We’ve seen a steady year-over-year improvement in location accuracy. Why hasn’t anyone noticed? This isn’t a secret.” Marx said AT&T will focus more on confidence-based rather than time-based location.

John Snapp, West Safety Services vice president-technology safety services, said much of the infrastructure still used is based on old technology. “What we see today is what came out in 1998 or 2000; it’s very old technology,” he said. But the carriers are moving to device-based hybrid, Snapp said. “People often say how come Uber can find you, but 911 can’t,” he said. “It’s because [Uber] uses a combination of technologies and that’s really what device-based hybrid is.” The technology relies on a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi location, he said. “To me, that is the biggest change,” he said. “Even if you’re not attached to a Wi-Fi access point, but just from the fact that your phone is seeing one.”

Different hybrid technologies have been available since 2015, but still aren't widely used for 911 calls, said Reinhard Ekl from RapidSOS. “It’s not new technology,” he said. “It just hasn’t been rolled out widely and in a robust and modern way.” Carriers aren’t to blame, Ekl said. “I’m absolving the carriers,” he said. “They’re just working in an environment that is very challenging” and under the restrictions including the legacy 911 system and the legacy transmission pathways, he said. “The data pipeline was built for landlines.”

APCO Notebook

Data collected by the FCC shows that many more PSAPs are now able to accept texts to 911, Furth said. That was a major push under former Chairman Tom Wheeler (see 1408110031). In June 2015, only 5 percent of PSAPs could handle texts, compared with 26 percent last June, Furth said. He also stressed that in the current environment it's unlikely the FCC will allocate additional exclusive-use spectrum for public safety. He said comments have just come in on the 4.9 GHz public safety band, which is being looked at for sharing, (see 1808060033), and the FCC will look closely at what commenters recommend.

Alan Tilles, lawyer with Shulman Rogers, said there has been no follow up since last year when the FCC held a workshop on 800 MHz interference issues (see 1711060027). Tilles raised the issue during a presentation by the FCC. Commission officials called for a continuing conversation between public safety and the carriers, Tilles told us. He said he reached out to the carriers. “I sent them all an email, included the commission: nothing, crickets,” he said. Industry “hasn’t followed up with us in any form at all,” he said. “This is getting to be more of a problem not less of a problem.” Municipalities are spending more and money and time dealing with interference issues, he said. CTIA didn’t comment.