Got next?

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Donny Jackson

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

Certainly there are plenty of people looking at the issue. Trade organizations such as the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), local public-safety entities, state governments and even a federal agency — the U.S. Department of Transportation — are working to make the vision of a next-generation 911 network a reality.

NENA's effort to develop an IP-friendly I3 guideline has received considerable attention, and an I3 draft proposal is expected to be ready later this year, said Roger Hixson, NENA's technical issues director.

Stephen Meer, chief technology officer for Intrado, said the I3 development process is doing an excellent job of identifying the available functionality that public safety needs in future 911 systems, but the group working on I3 is light on actual operational experience, he said. As a result, Meer fears that the I3 guidelines will lack the detail that helps make the current 911 system reliable.

“The current 911 system was built on a strong foundation of telephony. When you go to VoIP, you don't have any Bell standards to fall back on,” Meer said. “For instance, a 5E switch is a pretty stable piece of hardware. With a softswitch, there's an update every week.

“The general constituency of NENA doesn't understand how it works … and shame on us for not doing a better job of educating them. There are a lot of upstart companies offering VoIP at the table, but none of the [incumbent] telcos are there.”

Meer said public-safety entities that want to save money and gain control of their 911 systems — for instance, by deploying their own selective routers rather than relying on such services from the local exchange carrier (LEC) — may be in for a rude awakening upon taking such action, if only because of the increased security necessary in an IP-based network. In addition, some of the next-generation vision often is not being translated well into real-world terms, according to Moore.

“I think there is a good effort being expended on what we would like [the next generation of 911] to look like, but I don't think anybody has come near to talking about or defining how we make that happen,” he said.

Indeed, a prerequisite of all the design proposals is for each PSAP to be connected to a broadband pipe — a scenario that increasingly is possible, but is far from a reality today, Moore said.

“It's not really the selective routing part, it's not really the provider, it's not really the technology,” Moore said. “It's that, right now, a PSAP typically has [centralized automatic message accounting] two-wire trunks coming in that the LECs put in place, and that's the only connectivity they have to the outside world. It goes back to the oldest thing in the book: ‘It's the pipe, stupid.’”