Telephony Magazine has details behind last week’s decision by the FCC to impose immediate requirements for voice-over-IP service providers to support E911 service only added to the growing momentum behind VoIP’s maturation as a replacement for traditional voice service.
Most 911 systems now automatically report the telephone number and location of 911 calls made from wireline phones, a capability called Enhanced 911 or E911. The FCC’s ruling imposed a 120-day deadline for VoIP providers to provide Enhanced 911, which could force some smaller players to buy a more expensive, short-term solution, driving up their low-cost offerings and signaling the end of cheap and dirty VoIP.
CLECs, cable companies and enhanced service providers are all moving rapidly to capitalize on the window VoIP opens to both the business and consumer markets. Combine that with a major enterprise push into premises-based VoIP in 2004 and the cable industry’s aggressive selling of digital voice much of it VoIP-based and you have a service that has come of age even faster than expected, said Keith Nissen, senior analyst with In-Stat.
In the near-term, the VoIP players banking on winning customers with low-cost, best-effort toll replacement services have been dealt a serious blow, said John Muleta, the former head of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and now a private attorney and co-chair of Venable’s Communications Group in Washington.
They will have to start using CLECs to get to the level of performance required in 120 days, he said. It’s virtually impossible for a start-up that wants to provide national service to get connects to every [public safety access point] in the country on their own, when there is no national standard for doing that. As an interim step, they might have to go to a solution that is a lot more expensive.
Vonage and Intrado described the technology behind the service. It consists of a Vonage E-911 server that queries an Intrado server for call routing instructions about where to send a 911 call. The E-911 system then queries Intrado for details about the phone number and registered address of that number.
Rising costs for VoIP providers likely will mean rising prices for VoIP users.
The FCC passed the ball to the states to address funding of E911 for VoIP. Currently, wireline and wireless phone users pay a monthly service charge, which is collected by the states and remitted to the county governments to fund E911. States will have to act on their own to collect fees from VoIP users under the FCC plan.
But the states have dropped the ball.
According to a National Emergency Number Association (NENA) study, states have lagged behind the FCC’s mandated deadline. Only about 50 percent of public safety answering points (PSAPs) in the United States will be E911 Phase II compliant by 2005, four years past the FCC’s initial deadline for the installations. By the end of 2007, about 80 percent of the nation will have access to E911 Phase II capable PSAPs, according to the study.
A centralized national E911 coordinating office run jointly by the U.S. Commerce Department and the Department of Transportation was authorized by Congress to the tune of $250 million in matching grants for states, local governments and tribal organizations to improve their 911 communications systems, hire and train more personnel, as well as purchase equipment.
But many states took the 911 money and spent it elsewhere.
States that have diverted E911 surcharge fees and spent it elsewhere (a common practice), would be ineligible for the matching grants.
Meanwhile the cable industry is adding more than an estimated 20,000 VoIP subscribers a week to their service, more commonly called digital phone, that already includes E911 capability. And new service providers are addressing the booming enterprise market.
The FCC’s wireless E911 program is divided into two parts – Phase I and Phase II. Phase I requires carriers, upon appropriate request by a local Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), to report the telephone number of a wireless 911 caller and the location of the antenna that received the call. Phase II requires wireless carriers to provide far more precise location information, within 50 to 100 meters in most cases.
More information is available at the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials, ITS Public Safety, the National Association of State 9-1-1 Administrators and the FCC.
