Shwarma and the 9-1-1 Disconnect
I had shwarma for lunch today with an old friend and colleague, who I worked with at Sympatico-Lycos Inc. (SLI) during the dot-com (back in the day). She’s a fantastic person with a great deal of inner strength, warmth and charm, and our lunches – about one every other year – are small blessings.She was a great friend to have during that very challenging time, when I was a young Director in one of Bell’s Byzantine divisions and she was a pleasantly-jaded product manager. I remember the sympathy she showed when I tried to affect change in a fractured landscape riddled with landmines, red tape and unpleasant surprises. We never talked about it at the time, but later reflections and conversations illustrated her complete understanding.
I won’t get deep into the debacles, quagmires and political power struggles that were the day-to-day at SLI, but note that its foundation was an ill-conceived joint-venture where the utopian vision of a technical masterpiece was forced into implementation by executive management without sufficient technical due diligence or business planning. If someone had actually spent a few days kicking tires, it would have been another JV Monster dead-in-the-water before it had time to rise from the mire like a vengeful Swamp Thing dedicated to tormenting the little people. Sigh…
She received a buy-out package during the massive layoffs that followed the February, 2001 bubble burst and spent a few years dallying at new media companies. But she wanted more than that – to do something meaningful and fulfilling with her professional life. And what she found was an opportunity to become a dispatcher for 9-1-1.
She’s been telling me about this high-pressure, high-satisfaction job for years now and I am always fascinated by stories of the astonishing calls she takes. She’s helped people (who she refers to as “catchers”) deliver babies when ambulances couldn’t arrive in time, and she’s stayed on the phone with suicidal people who have cut themselves and suddenly developed the desire to stay alive.
By keeping her composure under intense pressure, she’s been able to get vital details from people who are out-of-their-mind and on the brink of death – saving their lives in the process. Conversely, there are times when people call 9-1-1 in a panic from their cell phone, say “send an ambulance quick” and then hang up – and end up FUBAR’d because 9-1-1 has no idea where they are.
And that’s what leads us to the point of this entry – how unnecessarily difficult it is to get location information from people who call 9-1-1 when processes should be in place to make communicating this data instant and transparent to the caller.
This isn’t about the very well-documented failure of VOIP systems to integrate with the 9-1-1 system (see last May’s An Update on Consumer VOIP warning article for more on that), but about how we’re all being exposed to an outrageous risk by systems which haven’t properly been integrated. And, frankly, it’s ridiculous.
In Canada, wireless carriers can locate an active handset (phone) either through sophisticated triangulation from nearby cell towers or an automatic location system that uses Global Positioning System (GPS) chips. This “Enhanced 9-1-1 Wireless Location Service” is something that ALL of us pay for every month on our cell phone bills (Telus charges me $0.50 a month for this) and that none of us gets any possible insurance or value from. This is because 9-1-1 call centers have no technology that allows them to read this data.
That’s right… We pay a monthly fee to our wireless service providers so they can transmit data to 9-1-1 which 9-1-1 can’t receive.
Sigh… Sometimes I long for a paradigm shift where intelligent planning actually occurs in a reality that places value on systems interoperability and scalability. Dare to dream…
In Canada, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association has their act together. As an industry body, they have been developing policy, standards and technology for a wireless Enhanced 9-1-1 Service for almost seven years. There’s some really good information on their site (including a history of meeting minutes), and I appreciate how all the telcos and governments appear to have been playing together nicely in order to theoretically save our lives in case of an emergency.
Now we just need to push a few buttons to connect the loose wires over the final bureaucratic disconnect. I think I’ll write an article about this for NOW, and tie-together the VOIP and Wireless 9-1-1 issues. I know lots of people who don’t have home phones anymore, and these points need to be hammered home in the minds of consumers and policy makers.
Ok… enough rant. This was supposed to be a summary about lunch chat, and not the rough draft of an article. I’ll just finish-off with some tips to remember when calling 9-1-1 from a wireless (or VOIP) phone:
- Give the operator your phone number including the area code, so they can call you back if you’re disconnected.
- Tell the operator your location or the location of the emergency.
- Indicate what the emergency is.
- Stay on the line with the operator; you are not being billed for the airtime.
- Do not hang up until the operator advises you to do so. After hanging up, leave your wireless phone turned on in case the operator must call you back.
Just a final thought on this... If I'm paying $0.50 a month for E911 from Telus, and every other mobile phone subscriber in Canada is also doing this (I'll take conservative guesses that 25% of us have mobile phones and that there are 7.5M handsets in circulation), then where is that $45M/year going? Some big black hole somewhere? Or are we just padding the telco's bottom lines due to a CRTC mandate that these fees be collected, even though there are no systems in place to receive the data? Sigh...
I'm thinking that this really does need to be looked into & written up.
Additional reading:
Psst: Traditional 911 Doesn't Always Work, Either
Cellphone companies pick up the call for help
Calling for help
Telus on E911
Fido on E911
Just in case of emergencies
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