This week marks the first anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission’s Phase I
enhanced 911 deadline, and by most accounts, not much progress has been made.
SCC Communications Corp.,
which provides 911 operations support systems, estimates less than 3 percent of the public safety answering points have
deployed Phase I services. The company said it has received requests for the service from about 2,500 PSAPs of an
estimated 5,000 PSAPs nationwide.
Phase I of the FCC’s mandate requires wireless carriers to provide the 10-digit
call-back number and the location of the cell site transmitting wireless 911 calls. The mandate became effective April
1, 1998, but stipulated carriers only must provide such information after receiving a request from a PSAP capable of
handling the information and if methods for recovering the costs of the systems were in place.
While several
obstacles may be slowing deployment down, including liability and cost-recovery legislation, some experts believe a
lack of cooperation among several parties and a low level of interest at the local public safety level partly may be to
blame.
Clem Driscoll, president of C.J. Driscoll & Associates, said Phase I deployments so far have been most
successful in areas where local public safety officials have taken it on as a cause and aggressively worked to get it
deployed.
“If nobody champions the cause, then it doesn’t get done,” said Driscoll. “I’m afraid
there is a fair amount of finger pointing going on as to who is at fault for why this is going so slow.”
Tim
Zenk, director of external affairs at Xypoint Corp., a wireless E911 systems integrator, said carriers are not receiving
many requests from the public safety community. The FCC also needs to outline more clearly its expectations of the
wireless and public safety communities, said Zenk.
“At some point, wireless calls to PSAPs are going to
overtake wireline calls to PSAPs,” said Zenk. “We’re clearly at a point where we need to do
something.”
Zenk also said some local exchange carriers have been reluctant to provide access to their
databases, which has further slowed the process of deploying Phase I.
Zenk noted that 27 states have passed
legislation to provide a cost-recovery method for Phase I. During the last year, said Zenk, Xypoint has been trying to
educate and encourage PSAPs to request Phase I services in areas where cost-recovery methods were in place, without
much success.
Zenk said he is optimistic more progress will be made during the next year or so, but he said he
doubts Phase I deployments will reach 50 percent of the country by 2001.
Meanwhile, much attention has been
focused on the second piece of the FCC’s E911 mandate. Phase II requires carriers to pinpoint a caller’s location to
within 410 feet, 67 percent of the time by October 2001. Experts caution, however, that Phase I must come
first.
“You can’t go from nothing to Phase II,” said Ira Barron, vice president of marketing and business
development at SCC. “It’s the logical first step.”
Barron said Phase I provides PSAPs a call-back
number, which is critical if a call drops, and it also puts location-based routing into the network. Furthermore, said
Barron, even when Phase II technologies are deployed, potentially one-third of the population still will be unserved,
and Phase I will provide back-up services for those callers.
“We’re seeing great strides in Phase II as
evidenced by Houston Cellular’s trial using True Position’s technology and SnapTrack’s upcoming Alpha handset
demonstration in Tampa,” said Barron. “But as opposed to the technology and implementation hurdles that
Phase II still faces, the only hurdles slowing Phase I are political, and when it comes to protecting people’s health and
safety, politics is a poor excuse for these delays.”
