Parts of Wheeler Proposal on Indoor Location Accuracy Rules See Immediate Carrier Opposition
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal for wireless 911 location accuracy rules, set for a vote at the agency's Jan. 29 meeting, would still impose performance metrics on carriers, industry and public safety officials told us Tuesday. Wheeler announced in a blog post last week that the FCC would take up an enhanced version of what was proposed by APCO, AT&T, CTIA, the National Emergency Number Association, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon in their proposed road map. The FCC approved an NPRM proposing a different set of rules in February (see 1402210038).
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The road map is built around the concept of a dispatchable address for every call, wireless or wireline. The road map emphasizes that the advent of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies makes a dispatchable wireless address available where it was not in the past, putting the wireless world on a par with the wired world (see 1411190064).
The Wheeler proposal has two major sticking points, said industry officials briefed on the plan. The first is how carriers’ indoor location accuracy performance is assessed, they said. The road map proposed that progress be judged based on total calls received. The Wheeler plan proposes instead that figures be broken up into indoor and outdoor calls and to get at that figure, the FCC would develop a “proxy” under which all calls that go over GPS or any satellite-based technology need to be counted separately from calls that use a non-satellite technology.
A carrier executive said the proxy takes out of the equation the high percentage of calls in which the caller is able to connect to a satellite, which would then get a fix on his or her location. A subscriber very often can get a lock on the satellite indoors and things are going to be happening with satellite constellations over the next couple of years that will make that even more likely, the executive said. If you take out the satellite calls and throw them out, you’re left with the most challenging of the indoor calls, the source said.
In a second policy call raising industry concerns, the FCC wants to stick with the February NPRM's proposal that carriers be able to provide altitude of the caller, the so-called z coordinate, as part of location information, officials said. Under the FCC proposal, carriers would be required to provide the z-axis of calls if they're unable to meet the targets in the plan. Officials said the expected final targets are indoor location accuracy within 50 meters within three years, rather than the two years proposed by the NPRM. Carriers would have to achieve 80 percent reliability within six years. If carriers can’t count satellite calls, there's no way they will be able to meet those targets, said an industry lawyer. The z-axis requirement kicks in after six years.
A carrier executive said technology now on the market doesn't make it possible to identify the caller's altitude and that data point is difficult to use by first responders. Dispatchable address provides an address and an apartment number or a suite number or a floor number or whatever other specific address information is available, the official said. The industry believes it has moved beyond z-axis and has no confidence in its ability to deliver it.
“Chairman Wheeler is to be commended for leading the effort to solve the … need for public safety to be able to locate people and give them quick response when they make a wireless call to E911,” said Harlin McEwen, chairman of the Communications & Technology Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “I look forward to working with the commission to make this a reality.”
Jamie Barnett, Venable lawyer and former chief of the FCC Wireless Bureau, said he's generally pleased with the details he's hearing of the proposal. Barnett represents the FindMe911 coalition, which has been at loggerheads with proponents of the road map. “We are very pleased that the commission is moving to adopt a final rule on this issue with such speed and concern for public safety,” he said. “The commissioners and staff have worked hard to fix the problem of indoor location accuracy, but this is a problem of the carriers' own making. So, the FCC should use this opportunity to fix it once and for all, so we don't spend years or decades longer struggling to locate indoor 911 callers using inaccurate, unverifiable location information.”