FCC broadband initiatives for schools, rural areas could impact future public-safety strategies
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FCC broadband initiatives for schools, rural areas could impact future public-safety strategies
Today, 911 calls from inside a school or library means someone has to make a call from a landline at the front office/front desk to give the public-safety answering point (PSAP) location information automatically. While this provides a dispatchable address to the front desk, that may not be the best location information, particularly at a large high-school campus and the incident occurs somewhere away from the front office. In this scenario, it’s also less than ideal to have to lose time trying to convey an emergency message to the front office/front desk when seconds may count.
Meanwhile, the location problems associated with 911 calls made from cell phones has been a hot topic of late, so I won't repeat all of those issues.
Virtually all mobile devices today have Wi-Fi capability, so the user devices would not be impacted. And the nice part about the proposed solution from TCS and Cisco Systems is that it does not require the user to be logged into a Wi-Fi network at the time. The user only needs to have Wi-Fi connectivity on—so that something shows up under “Choose a network” on Wi-Fi settings—for the nearby Wi-Fi access points to calculate location information.
With the FCC making indoor-location accuracy for 911 calls from mobile devices a priority, finding an effective and cost-effective solution is important. Some sort of Wi-Fi-based technology certainly is not the only approach, but it is worthy of consideration, especially if Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous within schools, where far too many emergency incidents like shootings have occurred in recent years.
Potential FirstNet partnerships and 911 are not the only aspects of public-safety communications that could be impacted by Friday’s FCC actions. We’ll talk about other potential implications in this space next week.