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

Mon Jul 25 12:04:30 UTC 2005

On 25-jul-2005, at 13:45, Brad Knowles 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.

As someone else already pointed out: systems like ISDN, GSM and VoIP  
look at the whole number, not at the individual digits as they come  
in, like POTS. So 911 and 9114567 are different 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.

That may be a bit much, but I think 112 and 911 would be a good start.

But a real solution would be for the terminal to deduce that the user  
is trying to call an emergency number and then dial the correct  
number, whatever that may be at the current location at the current  
time.

>     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,

Do you think there are numbers like this? Here in NL there was a  
drastic renumbering 10 years ago, about half the country got a new  
number. That was to allow 00 for int'l, 0800 and 0900 and 1xx. I  
don't think anyone feels like doing it again.  :-)

>>  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.

Actually their system isn't that bad compared to others. But it still  
sucks compared to having different numbers that immediately connect  
you to the right person.

> However, just because you can create badly designed IVR systems  
> does not necessarily mean that all IVR systems should be outlawed.

No, they should be outlawed because even the good ones are incredibly  
annoying, and the bad ones lead to suicide.

>     Likewise with emergency services numbers.  They need to be well- 
> designed, yes.

Unfortunately they leave a lot to be desired. Good reason to stay  
healthy and avoid accidents.

> But they needn't be outlawed unversally just because some people  
> are incompetent and cannot create one that works properly.

Who said anything about stuff being outlawed?