Pai Says FCC Will Focus on Best Practices, Move to NG-911
The FCC will push for the development of best practices for calls to 911 and work to speed transition of public safety answering points to next-generation 911, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said during a speech at the NG911 Institute Wednesday. The program also included 911 officials from three of the areas hardest hit by last year’s wave of storms -- southern Florida, Houston and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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“We need to learn from our experiences over the last several months and develop best practices so that we’re better prepared and more effective in responding to future disasters,” Pai said (comments later posted), noting the Public Safety Bureau released a public notice seeking comment on the public and private sectors’ preparation for and response to the 2017 hurricane season (see 1712070066). “We want to know what worked and where we can improve service availability and restoration,” Pai said. “We want to hear from all stakeholders.”
It’s clear 911 systems shouldn’t be designed so a “single point of failure” can bring the entire network down, Pai said. Problems aren’t going to go away, he said. Four major hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. last year, he noted. This year already has seen deadly wildfires and mudslides in California, plus the false missile alert in Hawaii (see 1801170050). Pai again said the false alarm was unacceptable (see 1801160054). “Based on the information we’ve collected so far, it appears that the incident was caused both by human error and by the state of Hawaii not having reasonable safeguards in place to prevent that human error from leading to the transmission of a false alert,” he said.
Moving to NG-911 “is important for a whole host of reasons,” Pai said. “One that’s sometimes overlooked is that NG-911 networks can support greater resiliency, redundancy and reliability than legacy 911 networks.”
During a disaster, “the problems that we have are magnified,” said Greg Rubin, chief operations officer of the Miami Dade Police Department. “The problem that we have every day is finding the caller” and NG-911 will help, he said. “Finding the person’s location is critical. Without that, nothing else matters.”
Last year’s storms showed the limitations of the current generation of 911 in locating callers, Rubin said. When an emergency call comes in today, the call center gets the cell tower location and has to send a signal back out to get more specific location information, he said. “It’s called rebidding.” During Irma, because of all the towers down, “you weren’t getting phase II information on a lot of calls and if you were you had to rebid, rebid, rebid,” he said.
Officials from the Virgin Islands said they need NG-911 and better location information because street addresses there are historical and idiosyncratic. Nadia Fearon, 911 district manager for St. Croix, said a visitor will call and say “'I’m at Route 44' [and] we’re like, ‘Do you see a big tree? Do you see the blue car?’ We have a big hole there that we have to figure out.”
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler also made NG-911 a top priority, with an emphasis on funding. During the last administration, the FCC Task Force on Optimal Public Safety Answering Point Architecture completed a number of reports (see 1605060063). Wheeler two years ago said the FCC had done everything it could on 911 and needed help from Congress and additional funding (see 1601290051).