FCC Asking Questions on Texting in Emergencies
HOUSTON -- A major question the FCC must work through with the advice of the public safety community is how people will be able to send text messages seeking help to 911 call centers nationwide, said Jeff Cohen, senior legal counsel to the FCC Public Safety Bureau. “Certainly one important thing I hear about … is the inability to send texts to 911,” he said at a town hall meeting at APCO on the regulatory framework for a next-generation 911 service. “We need to figure out what’s the best way to support real-time texting, and it’s especially important for the safety community."
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The FCC will have to look at how to manage expectations, since people will start to expect immediate response to their texts, a speaker said. Another tricky issue will be verifying that the text is legitimate. Police and firefights don’t want to go out on calls that aren’t legitimate, the speaker noted: “You're going to have to respond back to the person [seeking] information. … The time delay that it takes to go back and forth not only will create a time delay in response but it’s also going to create a problem for staff because you're going to have a telecommunicator tied up on this messaging back and forth, which is going to keep them from ultimately taking other calls.” Another speaker said creating a standard for texting will be difficult since the language of texting changes so quickly.
Cohen said the FCC is preparing a notice seeking comment on various recommendations for a next-generation 911 network. Cost issues are critical, he said. “In the National Broadband Plan, we recognized that we actually don’t have a good picture of what the cost will be in terms of deploying next-generation 911 across the country -- we know it will be significant.” The FCC is recommending that the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council look at the costs. “Once that kind of study can be done then our thinking is that could help inform Congress in terms of establishing an appropriate grant program,” Cohen said. The states have a big role to play, he said. “We see this more as what is necessary from a federal level to enable states and localities to best deploy next-generation 911 in a cost-effective and uniform manner.”
Other issues being examined by the FCC include, according to Cohen: Enabling economies of scale and economies and uniformity in public safety answering point equipment, standardized public safety answering point training and certification, credentialing for a telecommunicator emergency response task force, how to meet the needs of the disabled community and how to prevent the raiding of 911 funds by the states. The public notice will examine what jurisdictional authority the commission should have over broadband-enabled devices, how it can guarantee that all states deploy next generation 911, whether all new services the FCC sanctions have 911 requirements, the need for a continuing funding mechanism, how to address privacy issues and how the agency can make caller ID spoofing illegal.