Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service

Wed Jul 20 10:34:03 UTC 2005

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
>>   In either case, simply keeping the last known signal lock may 
>>very well be one of the worst things you could do.
> 
> Depends on what you want to do with the location info. If you
> want to immediately dispatch a vehicle, then you have to realize
> that you may be sending one to the edge of the cell tower's range
> when the caller is many miles away. Or that you might be sending
> one to the east side of the downtown highrise district when the
> caller has moved on to the west side of the downtown highrise
> district.
> 
> On the other hand, maybe all you want to do is to route the
> call to the right E911 center. In that case, as long as you
> are in the right county you are probably OK.
> 
> In any case, no solution to E911 and VoIP is likely to meet
> 100% of its requirements, but if you can improve the situation
> significantly, then it is still worth doing.

I have never seen any real study by the emergency response services
on how many problems they actually have other than isolated worst-
cases and a lot of political rah-rah. In the end I expect that any
technically feasible improvement to the cell phone position accuracy
is miniscule to the actual effort and expenditures it requires. So
my guess is that the real drivers are the law enforcement agencies
wanting to get better tracking abilities. Whether they get out of
deal what they are hoping for remains to be seen.  Not that they will
tell us anyway.

-- 
Andre