Financial flux

But this database-funding question pales in comparison to the biggest dilemma facing the NG-911 migration — how to pay for the migration to the next-generation architecture, which will cost billions of dollars to implement and will result in greater ongoing maintenance costs, particularly as both legacy and next-gen systems have to be maintained simultaneously in the near term.

Generating money for NG-911 is a problem on several levels. Many local and state funding mechanisms were based primarily on wireline telephony lines, but that market is dwindling rapidly. Where the model has been updated to reflect the growth in wireless and VoIP 911 calls, elected officials in many states have seen 911 coffers as a convenient source of money that can be raided to address general budget shortfalls, particularly in a down economy.

Meanwhile, federal 911 funding in the past has been authorized, but only a paltry amount actually has been appropriated. With Congress agreeing to spend $7 billion on a nationwide LTE network for public safety, most Beltway sources doubt that lawmakers will be eager to spend billions more on another public-safety communications initiative like NG-911.

Even if Congress is willing to provide the necessary funding for NG-911, no accurate cost estimate for the entire nation currently exists because one key variable — how to do it — largely is unknown at this point, Hixson said.

"If you do it county by county, it's going to cost a fortune," he said. "If you do it on a regional basis … it's going to cost a heck of a lot less." The problem is that, other than a handful of installations such as the one in Vermont, very few PSAPs have committed to an approach thus far.

With little evidence that the economy will bounce back soon, finding the funding that is critical to making NG-911 a reality will be a very tough challenge. But if this piece of the puzzle can be found, the future of 911 systems appears promising, according to Magnussen.

"Technically, I think we're pretty much there," he said. "You can put a solution together today that would work, would be viable and everything else. Obviously, we thought we would be further along. But, when the budgets started to crater in a lot of states a couple of years ago, they pulled away a lot of the money they were planning to use for early deployments to handle shortfalls in the state budgets.

"Unfortunately, that's two years that we've lost that we'll never pick up again. But the quicker we can get going on this again, the sooner we'll be done."