PSAP survey reflects dire need for indoor-location accuracy improvements

“We thought 250 responses would be a good sample,” he said. “Well, there’s so much pent-up emotion about this—because there’s so many stories—I think we really tapped a lot of frustration, because these 911 people are having people die on the phone with them, or they can’t locate them, and the people are getting frantic and stuff. So, we ended up with over 1,000 responses from 880 different PSAPs, which is a significant percentage of them nationwide with good geographic coverage from all 50 states.”

“They seem pretty unanimous … that this is a major problem. “I think this has tapped a very strong feeling in the public-safety community.”

Some of the notable findings from the survey are:

·         Wireless location data is not trustworthy: 82% of 911 personnel do not have a great deal of confidence in the location data provided to their PSAPs by the wireless carriers;

·         Wireless location data is often inaccurate:  54% said that the latitude and longitude (i.e. Phase II) data provided by carriers that is supposed to show a caller’s location is “regularly” inaccurate;

·         Misrouted calls are a significant related problem:  48% of respondents said that 911 calls are regularly misrouted to the wrong PSAP in their area; and

·         First responders need accurate location information immediately:  79% said they need accurate location information within 15 seconds of call arrival.

Barnett said many of the misrouting problems are the result of Phase I solutions, which bases location on the tower that the 911 caller uses to access the network.

“I think about this a lot, because my office in Washington, D.C., is close to the river,” Barnett said. “Depending on where you are, if you dial 911, your cell call could hit a tower across the river, which means it will be routed in Virginia. They’ll catch it, and they’ll route it back to the D.C. unified communications center, but it can take some time—sometimes it can take a minute or more, and sometimes cell-phone calls drop, so that’s the problem.

“The technology really does exist to locate somebody within about 10 to 15 seconds, and it’s not based on where the tower is. That’s the XY routing. If you get the good fix that early, then you can choose what PSAP it needs to go to, based on that information. That’s what we really need to move toward. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t think next-generation 911 comes along until you can really do that.”