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Smarty Jones
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- I saw this article today at Slate.com and have lots of thought about it that for the most part I'll keep to myself. It would be an insufferable essay.
I will say that in a subtle way it reflects the America of today and Americans in general. They want it both ways. In spite of all the FCC orders and proclamations of bureaucrats, politicians, business people and so on, wireless ALI or automatic line identification, is nowhere near meeting the deadline for the vast majority. Implementing it is fraught with problems. Realistically it's not going to happen for a long time. The problems are way too complex to go into here. VoIP? Hah! 911 people are totally against it because it inconveniences them even more than wireless.
The bottom line for me is this: Americans are spoiled and expect everything. They forget (or weren't alive) when 911 started, when most of emergency response was done by the local telco or the cops. They'd call us at Mountain Bell with trunk and circuit id number, had to give a passcode, and we looked up CNA (Customer Name and Address) for them. I won't go too much into the whiny deputies and officers of today who want an entire situation laid out for them word for word before they'll respond in the name of "officer safety", which really only comes into play realistically in less than 10% of calls for service. They're just spoiled and want the report pre-written for them.
The same to me is true for citizens. They want their cake and eat it too. We are in an era of great change in communications and travel, no different than 100 plus years ago. With new technology it is unrealistic to expect the same capabilities as the old technology. In fact, on wirelines, where the ANI/ALI is correct 98% of the time, we still have to ask and verify the name and address only to get the occasional smart alec response "what does your screen say?" We ask because we get burned by the occasional database error but more likely because they're calling from a neighbor or friend's house and heaven forbid we should automatically use that because the tort lawyers will be right there. The difficulty of getting people to give their location on a wireless phone has little to do with not knowing from technology where people are located, but more on their own ignorance and histrionics, or purposeful evasiveness. On that I won't elaborate as much as I'd like either.
If someone wants the cost and mobility advantage of VoIP then they need to accept the responsibility of where they are, what their emergency or problem is and (with some exceptions) be able to relay that information. This whole entitlement mentality has resulted in some horrible "codependency issue" consequences in the American public. Government agencies are also loath to recognize that they actually may have to do some real detective work to find out where something or someone is because it affects the dependency they foster.
Read the article and let me know what you think; not about quality of service and so on, but the mind set of the author and how many people think along these lines. Whatever happened to good old American self-sufficiency? The spirit of independence and taking care of one's own self and those around you? Has this society deteriorated that badly? I have a long time friend who is 65 years old and a highly degreed person and a student of Western Civilization and history. She recently commented to me that it took years for The Roman Empire and the British Empire to decline but she's becoming convinced that American Civilization is in the first stages of decline. Maybe that's not news to you or you're not a believer but I'm beginning to wonder.
end of rant.
Smarty
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- This Is an Emergency
- 911 is a joke for VoIP customers.
By Ben Smith, Copyright 2004, Slate.com, All Rights Reserved
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2004, at 3:00 PM PT
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
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- When I called 911 one recent evening to report a mugging, I expected one of those fast-talking emergency operators. Instead, I got a lecture.
"Hello," a woman said.
"Hello," I said. "Is this 911?"
"No," she said.
After some prodding, she revealed that she did work for the New York Police Department. "911 is near here," she added unhelpfully.
Before I could report the mugging, the officer had her own report to make. "Is your carrier Vonage? Someone needs to make a complaint about them," she said. "I'm not an emergency operator. If you was to become unconscious, I don't have your address. This isn't good."
I've been a happy Vonage subscriber for a bit under a year now. Vonage is the leading American provider of Internet telephone service (also known as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP). The base of my phone, a standard cordless model, plugs into a featureless black box, which in turn plugs into my modem. That black box turns my voice into packets of data, which are carried over the Internet, then linked back into the regular telephone system. I pay $15 a month, down from the more than $40 I was paying Verizon. Plus, I can plug in my black box when I travel, allowing me to make and receive local New York calls if I'm in Texas or Latvia.
Verizon still beats Vonage in an emergency, though. When you dial the magic three digits from a standard land line, your call travels to a local switching station, then bounces to a dedicated network reserved only for 911 calls. This special emergency circuit also links the call to the "Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification" database of phone numbers, names, and addresses. Plugging VoIP into this system isn't easy. webhead Inside the Internet.
This Is an Emergency
911 is a joke for VoIP customers.
By Ben Smith
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2004, at 3:00 PM PT
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
When I called 911 one recent evening to report a mugging, I expected one of those fast-talking emergency operators. Instead, I got a lecture.
"Hello," a woman said.
"Hello," I said. "Is this 911?"
"No," she said.
After some prodding, she revealed that she did work for the New York Police Department. "911 is near here," she added unhelpfully.
Before I could report the mugging, the officer had her own report to make. "Is your carrier Vonage? Someone needs to make a complaint about them," she said. "I'm not an emergency operator. If you was to become unconscious, I don't have your address. This isn't good."
I've been a happy Vonage subscriber for a bit under a year now. Vonage is the leading American provider of Internet telephone service (also known as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP). The base of my phone, a standard cordless model, plugs into a featureless black box, which in turn plugs into my modem. That black box turns my voice into packets of data, which are carried over the Internet, then linked back into the regular telephone system. I pay $15 a month, down from the more than $40 I was paying Verizon. Plus, I can plug in my black box when I travel, allowing me to make and receive local New York calls if I'm in Texas or Latvia.
Verizon still beats Vonage in an emergency, though. When you dial the magic three digits from a standard land line, your call travels to a local switching station, then bounces to a dedicated network reserved only for 911 calls. This special emergency circuit also links the call to the "Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification" database of phone numbers, names, and addresses. Plugging VoIP into this system isn't easy.
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While land-line 911 calls travel on the copper wire that makes up your local phone system, a Vonage call starts online. VoIP calls enter the phone system through a local gateway that converts digital packets of sound into the analog signals that make up a typical phone call. If police responding to a VoIP 911 call tried to link the gateway's phone number to a physical address, they wouldn't find an emergency, just a room full of humming servers plugged into telephone lines.
VoIP companies have come up with a solution to the gateway problem. Vonage has figured out how to program its servers to attach caller ID to outgoing calls—my calls, for example, show my 718 area code and phone number. But that only works if I don't take my black box to Texas or Latvia.
At this point, creating functional 911 service means sacrificing one of the most attractive features that Vonage and the other inexpensive VoIP providers offer: portability. Phone and cable giants like MCI and Time Warner Cable that have recently jumped on the VoIP bandwagon have made 911 work by restricting their service to home use. MCI, for one, provides emergency call centers the phone numbers of its VoIP customers along with the assurance that they won't move their phones around the country or around the world. But without that portability, VoIP is pretty pointless—nothing more than a (slightly) cheaper version of regular telephone service.
The VoIP providers that allow portability, like Vonage and AT&T's CallVantage, are relying on a stop-gap solution. After I plugged in my black box, I logged on to Vonage's Web site and entered my address in an online form. When I dialed 911, Vonage used my address to search a database of call-center numbers maintained by a Colorado company called Intrado. During a short pause on my end of the line, Vonage translated "911" into the 10-digit number for a Brooklyn call center that Intrado identified as closest to my house.
This system has run into problems, comical and scary, around the country. The worst arrive when customers take their black boxes on the road. Recently, puzzled Nashville, Tenn., emergency operators struggled to find a caller's address—until they realized that they were responding to an emergency in Texas. The call-center solution is also fallible because it counts on individual public-safety agencies to provide 10-digit numbers. Some pass on numbers that lead to administrative lines, like the one I got. Some provide numbers that are answered only during business hours; at other times, callers get a message telling them to dial 911.
Unfortunately, the 911 call centers—aware that Vonage can't reliably tell them what address I'm calling from—have been reluctant to integrate VoIP numbers into their ANI/ALI databases. They've also been loath to share the secret, direct numbers for their emergency call centers, rather than administrative lines like the one I was given. Plus, their old-line computers can't read the digital information about my address that Vonage is capable of sending.
The VoIP/911 problem isn't totally insoluble, though. Legislation could be passed to force VoIP providers and local telephone companies to enter VoIP numbers into local address databases and/or to force emergency call centers to share their secret, direct numbers with VoIP providers. Consumers, however, would still have the burden of passing on their location every time they took their phone to a new city, even for a weekend. Alternately, emergency call centers could upgrade their computers so they can process the digital information that travels with VoIP calls—everything ranging from a caller's address to his medical records. But emergency call centers are local institutions, and either of these imperfect solutions would require the kind of national standardization that it's hard to imagine without federal carrots and sticks.
Meanwhile, a Florida company, VoIP Inc., is touting a self-consciously low-tech solution to the problem. It's a gizmo that links your VoIP phone to your old, unused land line (if you have one), which local phone companies are supposed to maintain for emergency use. I hadn't gone that low-tech the night I called 911. But the operator and I did rely on an old-fashioned method of pinpointing my location. "We're near Macy's," she told me. "Are you near Macy's?"
Ben Smith is a reporter for the New York Observer.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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