911, was You're all over thinking this (was: Re: Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service)

Mon Jul 25 11:45:42 UTC 2005

At 1:18 PM +0200 2005-07-25, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

>  What should happen instead is that everywhere, the most common ones are
>  made to work as additional CNAMEs for the local one.

	That doesn't work.  As has already been demonstrated, there are 
numbers elsewhere in the world with 999 as their area code or local 
prefix, and I'm sure the same is true for 112, 911, and all the 
various other "emergency services" numbers.  It's simply not possible 
to take all the various local numbers around the world and make them 
work globally as CNAMEs for whatever local area you may be in.

	There's no sense in hoping for something that you know is 
completely impossible.  It's a waste of your time and effort, and 
mine.

	What might possibly be achievable is to take a single number that 
is universally available without conflicts, or where conflicts would 
be least painful to resolve, and make that work everywhere -- being 
made the equivalent of a CNAME for whatever the appropriate local 
area you may be in.

>  This whole "single number" hype should end anyway. 10 years ago the
>  Dutch phone company had at least five different numbers: for b2c sales,
>  b2b sales, outages, billing and so on. Now they only have one number but
>  you have to waste time navigating through a "voice response" maze. That's
>  not what I call progress.

	That's a failure in their IVR design, yes.  However, just because 
you can create badly designed IVR systems does not necessarily mean 
that all IVR systems should be outlawed.  Just because you can create 
badly designed web pages doesn't mean that all web pages should be 
outlawed.

	Likewise with emergency services numbers.  They need to be 
well-designed, yes.  But they needn't be outlawed unversally just 
because some people are incompetent and cannot create one that works 
properly.

	However, as I previously alluded to, these are long-term 
standards issues that would first need to be worked out with the ITU 
before there could possibly be any operational issues to be resolved.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.