Improved Wireless 911 Location Accuracy Must Be Key FCC Focus, Wheeler Says

"One of the really spooky things about my new job is I used to come into that very same office on bended knee,” Wheeler said. “Now I'm sitting there, experiencing it from the other side.” Wheeler said when he was CTIA president he was called in by former Chairman Reed Hundt to listen to a cassette tape recording of an emergency call a woman made from a train track in Texas from a car phone as a train approached. The woman was new to the area and didn’t know where she was exactly, he said. She left the car at the insistence of the 911 operator, Wheeler said. “Then you hear the crunch as the train hits the car,” Wheeler said. “Reed turns to me and says, ‘We're going to solve this’ and that was the beginning of a concerted effort to get location capabilities from wireless devices."

Wheeler said he took the issue to the CTIA board, which cast a tie vote on a motion saying carriers should deploy location capabilities in cellphones. Wheeler found himself in an uncomfortable position for an association president, having to break the tie with a yes vote, he said. “I hope that you put me down as an advocate of what you all are working on and that we can work together to deal with the next generation of challenges ... because an awful lot has changed since those days,” Wheeler said. “The nature of mobile has changed from a car phone ... to the phone that we all have in our pockets and take everywhere, and so the expectations and the needs change with that as well."

Wheeler said he understands the challenges presented by mobile calls made indoors, but also has seen the data filed at the FCC by the California chapter of the National Emergency Number Association (CD Aug 14 p4). “We need to address the technology, we need to get the technology to get in-building,” he said. “We need to make sure that the industry and [public safety answering points] are continuing their technological evolution.” Wheeler also said the FCC has a “regulatory responsibility” to get the rules right.

The FCC needs to assess the current 911 calling “landscape” and “discuss what more needs to be done by public safety answering points, by carriers and by the FCC as well,” said Public Safety Bureau Chief David Turetsky at the start of the workshop. Making the best information available to PSAPs on the location of 911 callers is “one of the most important public safety issues to this agency,” he said. “When someone in distress calls 911 for help they want it to arrive fast. Lives and their health may depend on it. Sometimes the caller may not know or be able to say where they are. That’s why providing accurate location information with a call to 911 matters and it matters a lot.”

Turetsky also said current 911 location accuracy rules should be updated. The 2011 rules “were based on the needs of public safety and consumers at that time,” he said. “But even since those rules were adopted the wireless landscape has continued to change considerably.” Americans’ use of wireless is only growing and 38 percent of households have cut the landline cord, he said. “The success by the wireless industry in making their service ubiquitous and in replacing wireline service may have in some ways outpaced the FCC’s rules as currently applied,” Turetsky said.

In some areas like California, 75 percent of all 911 calls come from wireless phones and a majority originate indoors, but the 2011 rules “assess location accuracy based on outdoor measurements only,” Turetsky said. He cited call-tracking data submitted to the FCC by CalNENA (http://bit.ly/1eHfFIU). “This data suggest that the percentage of wireless 911 calls in which E-911 Phase II information is delivered to PSAPs has declined in the last several years and this data raises serious questions that warrant further inquiry,” he said.

"We need to really look at indoor accuracy,” said Terry Hall, a Virginia PSAP director representing the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials at the workshop. “It is not a nicety to be able to do this. It is a requirement.” Almost everybody who buys a cellphone does so in part because of safety concerns, Terry said.

The public “has come to expect” that they can be located when they make a 911 call, said Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association, who worked with Wheeler on location accuracy issues as a former CTIA executive. “I hope this workshop explores potential solutions that would deliver E-911 location information,” he said. In the early 1990s, some thought it would be “easy” to develop standards for locating a caller within “a matter of inches,” he said. But the initial development of rules that went into effect in 2001 proved “long, arduous and sometimes litigious,” he said. “Technology constantly changes and wireless consumers will continue to rely on their devices to reach 911.” Fontes said he holds out hope that industry working with public safety will be able to work out a solution to make wireless 911 more accurate.

Carriers are working to make wireless 911 more accurate, said Jeanna Green, network development engineer at Sprint. Based on filings by CalNENA and other state interests PSAPs often are not seeking all the information that is already available by performing a “rebid” once the call has been completed to the call center, Green said. “The common theme I am seeing is that not all those rebids are being performed and ... if they would perform a rebid we would be getting higher Phase II accuracies at the PSAP,” she said. “PSAPs appear to be rebidding only about 15-35 percent of the time and if they would rebid I have Phase II available 77-89 percent of the time.”

"At Verizon Wireless, we consider a 911 call to the most important call on our network,” said Susan Sherwood, manager-E911 network & engineering operations for the carrier. “We work every day to make sure that our existing technology is working at peak efficiency, to look at ways to improve that technology and also to look at new technology vendors to see if they can assist us.”

CTIA Vice President Scott Bergmann defended carriers on the group’s blog Monday. “In the last few months, there’s been a lot of talk about the location data used by the public safety community to locate wireless 911 callers,” Bergmann said (http://bit.ly/I1Bquj). “I think it is important to highlight that CTIA and its members have a long history of developing and deploying 911 solutions and working with the public safety community on 911 implementation and continued improvement. The industry also has a long history of meeting its obligations, and the facts show wireless carriers continue to deliver the important information that is used to respond to 911 calls.” Bergmann slammed the Find Me 911 Coalition, saying its efforts were funded “by an E-911 technology vendor.” Carrier officials say they believe vendor TruePosition is largely funding the group. The company did not comment by our deadline.

Former Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett, who represents the Find Me 911 Coalition, fired back at CTIA in an e-mailed statement. “Facts are facts, and the data filed by states and localities with the FCC show that a majority of wireless 911 calls in California and Texas do not include the accurate locations needed to find callers in crisis,” he said. “Rather than arguing over technical compliance with outdated and incomplete regulations, we urge the carriers to work with us to address this issue and ensure that every 911 call[er] can be quickly and accurately located, now and in future.” Barnett said the group represents thousands of 911 operators and emergency responders across the U.S.

Part of the fight over better location accuracy has been waged in a paper battle at the FCC. TruePosition, which has developed an alternative solution for locating 911 callers, said in a recent filing the FCC needs to act quickly to address concerns raised by CalNENA and others. “Recent FCC filings in this docket and other publicly available information suggest that approximately 60 to 80 million wireless 911 calls are inaccurately located every year due to shortcomings in FCC regulations and wireless carrier location technology,” the company said (http://bit.ly/1jh7kOs). “This alarming statistic underscores a pressing need for FCC regulatory action. If emergency responders rely on carrier-generated locations for as little as a fraction of one percent of these millions of 911 calls, thousands of lives are at risk every year."

Verizon responded in a filing Friday at the FCC. “Any suggestion that Verizon does not comply with Commission rules is inexplicable,” the carrier said. In the case of California PSAPs cited in the CalNENA report “Verizon delivered Phase II data for 91-95 percent of all completed calls for use by the PSAPs consistent with Commission rules and public safety practices, and with Verizon’s network-wide level of 92 percent,” the carrier said (http://bit.ly/17hwmLk). “As Verizon and others have explained in the record, the CalNENA Report (and the other 911 call data TruePosition cites) measured the extent to which the PSAPs retrieved Phase II data that was available to them during the 911 call, not whether Phase II location was delivered consistent with the Commission’s rules and established practices that were developed in conjunction with the public safety community to accommodate PSAP architecture."

T-Mobile said in filing Friday the A-GPS technology used by carriers to locate wireless callers is already accurate and is getting better. “TruePosition paints a self-serving picture that A-GPS never functions well indoors,” T-Mobile said. “That is simply not the case.” True Position’s primary motive is promoting the Uplink Time Difference of Arrival (U-TDOA) it wants to sell carriers, T-Mobile said. “Having lost the battle to be the primary wireless E911 location technology, TruePosition now tries to argue that the FCC should mandate U-TDOA’s adoption as the ‘fallback’ technology to be used when A-GPS does not deliver a fix, or even first to then be improved-upon by an A-GPS fix,” T-Mobile said. “All of these arguments present problems and trade-offs that TruePosition fails to acknowledge or discuss.”