CTIA, Intrado, TCS Use Existing, New Technologies To Improve 911 Location Accuracy
With phone applications able to pinpoint a person’s location and send information based on that, it should be easy to find someone who calls 911 from a mobile device, but that’s not the case yet, said experts at APCO 2015 Wednesday. The difference between apps and 911 is that people have given an app permission to find them, whereas that permission hasn’t been given to 911, they said. To improve 911 indoor location accuracy, industry innovators have had to get creative with existing and new technology using, for example, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) like Intrado is experimenting with.
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CTIA is working to create the National Emergency Address Database (NEAD) to keep track of callers via Wi-Fi locations (see 1412160046). TeleCommunication Systems is approaching the problem from multiple angles (see 1508170044), from looking at the implementation of next-generation 911 to getting something put in handsets to help communicate a person’s location to the public safety answering point (PSAP).
CTIA plans to use any kind of location-based technology it can -- Bluetooth and Wi-Fi especially -- to get to an address and locate a 911 caller to send to the PSAPs, said Matthew Gerst, director-regulatory affairs. The goal is also to use the technologies to get additional information such as suite numbers or apartment numbers to the PSAPs to help locate the callers, he said. NEAD will be used to collect that data for the future, so if someone calls from a location that's in that database, the PSAP will be able to find the caller's location even faster, Gerst said. CTIA is excited about the use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi because “we're going to be solving the indoor location challenge actually using indoor location technologies.”
Companies such as TCS and Intrado face three challenges when a wireless call is placed to 911: call routing, enhanced location and indoor location, said Timothy Lorello, TCS chief marketing officer. Call routing difficulties occur mainly on PSAP boundaries and they require PSAP call transfers, he said. Those issues are being addressed with the installation of small cells, Lorello said. In enhanced location or Phase II -- the standard that requires latitude and longitude of a location within 150-300 meters -- challenges occur when a PSAP makes a query for enhanced data before the information has been received, he said. When that happens, the PSAP can rebid for the information, but that isn’t always effective, Lorello said. The real fix to this problem is to get NG-911 up and running, he said. The third challenge -- indoor location -- will need a multitechnology approach with help from NEAD and TCS’ own global Wi-Fi services, Lorello said. “We need to put something in the handsets,” he said. "There are standards bodies working on putting things in the handsets that will allow this information to be extracted. If we have that information at the centers, then it can dip into NEAD, dip into the mobility solutions engine and ultimately get the location fix that we need from the caller.”
Intrado is focusing a lot of its 911 location accuracy efforts on getting BLE beacons in communities, said John Snapp, senior technical officer. BLE beacons are low energy and low cost, running on a watch battery that lasts a month while transmitting 10 times per second, he said. If a person who calls from a wireless device is near one of the devices, the beacon transmits the person's distance from it, which can help to provide a manageable dispatch location, Snapp said. While it would be great to get those beacons in large buildings, he said it makes the most sense to start with getting residential consumers to install them in their own homes so when they call 911 from a wireless device, the beacon can transmit an accurate location and address to the PSAP. “It's very difficult to deploy something new just for 911,” he said. “The phone manufacturers are very excited about commercial location, but they're not real excited about 911. But if we can leverage what's being done on commercial location for 911, 911 now becomes a user of that and we can leverage all of the technologies being deployed. So now 911 becomes mainstream.”