Getting accurate location information for indoor wireless 911 must be a priority
Given the nature of emergencies, the time it takes to search for a person can be critical. To say that it can be a matter of life and death is not an overstatement, because examples proving this unfortunately are far too common. This is not a matter like 800 MHz interference that led to rebanding, where there was considerable theoretical danger but no reports of actual fatalities caused by the problem. With indoor 911 from wireless devices, emergency callers literally are dying while call-takers desperately try to determine their location, so they can send help.
Below are just a few of the heart-wrenching stories provided during a recent survey of public-safety answering point (PSAP) employees conducted on behalf of the Find Me 911 Coalition:
- From Texas: “Female ACTIVELY being assaulted while her assailant laughed in the background. We were never able to locate her.”
- From Missouri: “Received a 911 from a cell phone with an open line. It was a female that sounded as if she had her mouth gagged. She was getting beat, [and] even her dog was being hurt. The lat/long came to an abandoned building in St Louis City … Could not pinpoint her location, and her phone died. She was never found.”
- From South Carolina: “[Our] county had a person pass away while on the phone with our communicator within the past 24 months because we could not locate her in an apartment building. It took us over 30 minutes to locate her because we could not get Phase II data. She took her last breath while on the phone with the communicator. One life is too many when the technology is available to solve the problem.”
Whether the technology is available to solve this issue of location accuracy is the subject of considerable debate within the wireless industry. Some argue that technology exists—even for providing the unprecedented vertical location—while wireless carriers’ representatives say they want to help, but no indoor-location technology exists that has proven to be accurate enough to meet the FCC’s proposed rules, so it would be unfair to impose such rules until there is a tested solution.
