WASHINGTON-As the telecommunications industry and public safety met Thursday to discuss how to implement a Nov. 28 deadline for Voice over Internet Protocol providers to offer enhanced 911 to their customers, VoIP users were able to access 911 in New York City.
“The deployment of the VoIP E911 solution in New York City represents a significant milestone in the evolution of 911, providing VoIP subscribers in New York City with the same level of emergency response as traditional wireline service,” said Stephen Meer, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intrado Inc., one of the parties involved in the New York City deployment.
Verizon Communications Inc. and Vonage Holdings Corp. were also involved in getting VoIP E911 in New York City up and running.
Important lessons were learned and discussed during the New York City deployment. One was the importance of having a neutral third party in the room and definable benchmarks and milestones, said Chris Murray, Vonage director of government affairs.
“New York City was four months of Kabuki Theater,” said Murray, noting that negotiations had been tense until the New York emergency-services folks got involved.
The amount of cooperation necessary to deploy VoIP E911 across the country by the end of November means that everyone needs to start working together, said Maureen Napolitano, Verizon director of 911 customer services.
“We need as 911 service providers to know where the VoIP providers are going to connect on our network. We need to understand how many trunks and when. If everybody waits until Nov. 1, it’s not going to happen. We need to start doing it yesterday,” said Napolitano. “We still have not completed wireless, and it’s been 10 years. Now we’re doing VoIP in 120 days.”
The FCC in May adopted rules requiring VoIP providers to offer direct access to 911 services within 120 days of the effective date of the order. That date has now been set at Nov. 28.
While incumbent local exchange carriers are required to offer access to the 911 network to other telecommunications carriers, ILECs are not required to offer access to VoIP providers that consider themselves to be information services. Therefore, these VoIP providers must find their own way into compliance by using either third-party providers like Intrado or Telecommunications Systems Corp. or competitive local exchange carriers.
