Location accuracy for 911 hampered by migration from traditional telephony wireline services

NENA plans to establish working groups to consider options and recommend potential standards for fixed-line telephony-replacement technologies, many of which utilize different location approaches, Hixson said. There has not been a “meaningful update” to a review of such technologies in the last 10 years, he said.

“What we have is a widening and variable set of service approaches across different vendors and different types of technology, and it would appear that—in the interest of 911—we need to get that together a little better, in terms of what’s expected and why,” Hixson said. “The question is how to identify what the best path forward would be, given these new variations in service and trying to keep the consistency of location accuracy across these services as they change, from a technological standpoint.”

Whether the location-accuracy issue is addressed via a voluntary industry agreement or FCC regulation does not matter, as long as the matter is resolved as quickly as possible, Hixson said.

“If we need to come to some conclusion among all of those parties about what needs to be done, fine,” he said. “If it gets to the point where we need to make some recommendations to the FCC, that’s fine, too.

“But I think the status quo is not cutting it; we’ve got too many changes taking place, and we’re not keeping up with what those changes imply. 911 centers are paying a price for that, I think. And, inherently, the calling customer is paying a price for it—or could—if we don’t get it out of the status quo and into a more proactive stance.”

Allen Muse, AT&T Mobility’s director of public-safety relations, said the introduction of small cells into carrier networks could provide hope for better 911 location data in the future, although he acknowledged that the solution is not commercially available yet.

“These [small cells] represent not only for carriers to infill for capacity and coverage for small areas—particularly indoors—they also represent an opportunity for public safety, because they cover a small enough footprint that you can often identify the coverage area with an address,” Muse said. “If that’s a dispatchable address—and it very easily can be—then we’re moving back toward getting more of the useful information [about location to the PSAP] than we’ve been able to in the past.”