ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Plan for big changes, speakers at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials told association members at its California meeting. They emphasized the significance of FirstNet and the technology changes inherent in next-generation 911. The changes, which will need to be harmonious, will affect how 911 call center operators and other emergency communications officials should plan and train staff, speakers said.

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.

CTIA and the National Emergency Number Association raised objections to a key idea for fighting contraband cellphones in prisons, proposed in a May rulemaking notice(CD May 1 p1). The NPRM asks a battery of questions about what the FCC concedes is a growing problem. A top focus of the NPRM is speeding up the licensing process for managed access systems -- systems that use wireless base stations located within the prison itself to capture and block transmissions to or from unauthorized devices. The proposal was based in part on a rule change requested in September 2011 by CellAntenna, a company that builds systems for combating the use of contraband cellphones by prisoners.

The framework specifications of NENA i3 contain many gaps that may disrupt the transition to accessible next-generation 911, said a report from the FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee Monday (http://bit.ly/12uJvuR). NENA 08-003 version 2, yet to be released, may fix some of these gaps, it said, calling the NENA i3 work a “tremendous accomplishment” despite the work to be done. The report pointed to test requirement inconsistencies and lack of testing specification, how 911 call centers will be able to accept text messages as TTY during the transition, TTY limitations generally, the risk of not using terminal procedures for NG-911 handling and other aspects. The report does not claim to be comprehensive but wants its points taken into consideration in any future revision of the standards. Accessibility should be implemented from the start in NG-911, it said.

The four national wireless carriers are on target to make text-to-911 messages available to all public safety answering points capable or receiving them by a May 15, 2014, deadline, they said in reports filed this week at the National Emergency Number Association. That deadline stems from a voluntary agreement Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile signed with NENA and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials last year, under FCC pressure (CD Dec 10 p1). All four carriers said they're already transmitting bounceback messages to subscribers who try to send emergency texts before 911 call centers can handle them.

"I do know there are very many larger areas where the PSAPs are not ready to handle that,” said Chris Littlewood, project coordinator at the Allstate Center’s Center for Public Safety Innovation at the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute, of text-to-911. Education and outreach needs “to happen at the PSAP level as well,” he said. “I can tell you that it’s not just rural areas that have no idea that they need to be handling text-to-911 by the beginning of next year. … Are the PSAPs going to be able to handle that?” Different procedures will need to be in place at different levels of the 911 call centers, he said.

With the comment cycle now complete, FCC staff members appear to be pushing forward on an order addressing new rules in the aftermath of the 911 outages reported during last June’s derecho storm, said commission and public safety officials. The National Emergency Number Association and AT&T both reported last week on follow-up meetings with Public Safety Bureau staff to explain the comments they filed last month (CD May 30 p6).

The FCC should require all carriers to certify their systems meet “a core set of 911 resiliency practices,” which would be developed by public safety and other stakeholders, Verizon and Verizon Wireless said in reply comments. The comments responded to a March NPRM (http://bit.ly/YtIwc5) from the commission, reacting to last year’s derecho wind storm. It led to outages that affected 77 public safety answering points across Ohio, the central Appalachians and the Mid-Atlantic states, with 17 PSAPs losing service completely (CD March 21 p4).

The FCC should require carriers to notify public safety answering points within 15-30 minutes of a detected outage, CEO Brian Fontes and others from the National Emergency Number Association said in a meeting with Public Safety Bureau officials. NENA reacted to proposed rules by the commission, saying a requirement of immediate notification should be further refined. “The requirement under the PSAP notification rule should substantially differ from that under the Commission’s general network outage reporting rules,” NENA said. It said that a single notice of an outage won’t suffice. “We recommended that the Commission consider requiring regular supplemental notices, no less than twice per day, to keep PSAPs up-to-date as carriers and other service providers gain further information about an outage,” the filing said. “We also noted that while telephone and email contacts should be mandatory, PSAPs, carriers, and service providers should be free to adopt other notification methods, provided that PSAPs have a legitimate private choice as to whether they will adopt any particular method offered by a carrier or service provider.” NENA also weighed in on when PSAPs and carriers should be responsible for the connection of 911 call centers to the larger carrier network. “Diversity of circuits connecting end office switches with selective routers, as well as those connecting selective routers with the main distribution frames (or their equivalents) of end offices serving PSAPs should be the responsibility of carriers or service providers while the diversity of circuits connecting the ‘outside’ faces of main distribution frames with PSAPs should be the responsibility of PSAPs and 911 authorities,” the filing said. The FCC had said 911 calling problems were widespread following the derecho that hit the Midwest and East Coast June 29 (CD July 20 p1).

CTIA raised questions about a proposed FCC requirement that public safety answering points must provide bounceback messages for 911 calls in cases where they normally can handle emergency texts but are unable to for a given period. The FCC is set to take up an order at its meeting Thursday requiring all wireless carriers and providers of interconnected text message services to give consumers automatic bounceback messages by Sept. 30 when they try to send a text message to a 911 call center that isn’t capable of handling texts. Major carriers must be able to transmit bounceback messages by June 30 under an agreement reached last year between the four major national carriers, the National Emergency Number Association and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (CD Dec 10 p1). One issue that hasn’t been part of public discussions is the PSAP requirement, the subject of recent meetings between CTIA and FCC officials, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/10CoVpM). The mandate isn’t necessary, CTIA said. “The concept of providing PSAP initiated bounce back messages was not previously considered as part of the Carrier-NENA-APCO voluntary agreement,” the group said. “Even if the Commission does require a PSAP initiated bounce back messages, CTIA and the wireless participants noted that a standard method should be developed in order to avoid diverting critical PSAP resources when such bounce back messages are necessary.” CTIA said the requirement would apparently kick in only when “1) the wireless provider offers text-to-911 services to its subscribers, 2) the appropriate PSAP has requested and is accepting such text-to-911 messages sent from wireless subscribers, and 3) the PSAP, at that point in time, determines that the PSAP can no longer accept or process text-to-911 messages and requests that a wireless provider send a bounce back message to its subscribers.” Commission officials noted in December that it will likely be many years before most PSAPs are capable of handling emergency texts to 911 (CD Dec 13 p12).