NG-911 Deployment Struggling, but That's Expected Given Funding Issues, FCBA Speakers Say
Next-generation 911 is about as far as along as can be expected since Congress hasn’t provided adequate funding and a number of states have raided 911 funds, speakers said at an FCBA brown-bag seminar Thursday. A week ago, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the agency was making a push on the development of best practices for calls to 911 and working to speed transition of public safety answering points to NG-911 (see 1801170047).
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Of the 47 states that reported data last year, 22 have statewide NG-911 installation and testing, said Laurie Flaherty, FCC coordinator of the National 911 Program. Nineteen states awarded a state contract and 20 have adopted a statewide NG-911 plan, she said. Flaherty said the program submitted a report on the cost estimate for national NG-911 deployment, but Congress still is reviewing it. When the National 911 Program was established it was given the authority to make grants of $250 million over five years, Flaherty said. But Congress appropriated only $43 million, which isn’t enough, she said.
“I think we’re about where we expected to be given that we haven’t gotten the infusion of federal capital that we have said for years we thought would be necessary to make this transition is a reasonable time frame,” said Trey Forgety, National Emergency Number Association director-government affairs. The states and localities are moving “as best they can trying to make the transition,” he said. “The unfortunate side effect of having to go slowly, piece by piece, state by state, is that it creates incentives on both sides, commercial and public sector, to go slowly.”
Forgety said lack of “real leadership” at the federal level has slowed progress, “We can be a lot farther long, move a lot faster, but it will take a big shot in the arm,” he said. Release of the cost estimate report could help, he said. “What we hear from Congress is ‘look, we need a defensible number before we can start to legislate on this subject,’” he said. Forgety said since the amount of matching grants from the 911 program is small, some states have opted not to take the federal money and instead spend state 911 funds to balance the budget, or on other expenditures.
The telecom industry can develop the technology, but it takes much longer to deploy, said Drew Morin, a T-Mobile engineer. “I don’t think anybody expected us to be much further along than we are right now because of the scale that we’re talking about and we have to get things in place,” he said. Standards have to be developed and tested and companies figure out where there is a gap, Morin said. “All these things have to be worked through and that doesn’t count the policy, the data scrubbing, as well as the funding issues,” he said.
FCBA Notebook
Indiana is testing an approach to pocket-dialed and other inadvertent wireless calls to 911 -- with 911 operators sending a text to callers who hang up rather than returning the call, David Furth, deputy chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau, said during the FCBA panel discussion. “They’ve had had a much better response rate from people, saying, ‘Oops, sorry,’ if [operators] sent a text,” Furth said. “That’s a cost savings for them. It means there are fewer cases where the person is embarrassed to answer the phone and you’ve got to roll a [first responder] truck because you’re not sure.”