Public education key for effective text-to-911 implementation

In the short term, there is also a challenge associated with the fact that some people are not customers of one of the four nationwide wireless carriers, so any public-education needs to make it clear that texting to 911 may not be an option for them. Hopefully, the FCC will address this later in the year with a rulemaking that requires all carriers to support text-to-911 service.

So, should public-safety officials wait to educate the public about text-to-911 service, if it is not available to all? There may be some confusion, but getting the word out as soon as possible is still the better option, according to James Soukup, director of the Durham Emergency Communications Center in Durham, N.C.

“We make sure that, if you have this service [through your carrier], it will work,” Soukup said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Personally, I would much rather do that than have somebody have the service and not know that they could use it.”

One good thing about this public-education challenge is that the 911 community should be able to follow the lessons learned when telephony wireline 911 service initially was deployed in the late 1960s and 1970s—it was a process that took some time, but the public adapted.

Regardless of the strategies used, delivering an accurate message about the appropriate use of text-to-911 service—and its limitation—is important to its effective adoption. And delivering that message through certain key people and groups remains key, just as it probably was when 911 was first deployed more than 40 years ago.

“It’s critically important that leaders in the community—elected leaders, civic leaders, social-club leaders—they can do a lot to help encourage and support texting to 911 within their community,” Fontes said. “It takes leadership to really move this thing forward—and, I might add, funding.”