Concerns Surface that Rural Areas Could Fall Behind as IP Transition Moves Forward
Public safety officials face a challenge: how to ensure poorer, more rural areas of the country don’t fall behind their often richer urban counterparts as the industry transitions to IP technology. That was a major point of discussion at Thursday’s morning session of an FCC workshop focusing on incident response during and after the planned technology transition (See related story). Figuring out how to craft a national framework with minimum standards could pose difficulties, participants said, given a traditional preference among state and local authorities to do things themselves.
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"We suffer from our own control freak issues,” said Tom Sorley, Technology Committee Chairman at the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, and Houston deputy director-radio communication services. Each municipality, county and state “wants to control their own destiny, their own technology, their own everything,” he said. It’s possible, though, that some towns shouldn’t be handling emergency services, he said. In Sorley’s home state of Florida people needed certifications to spray pesticides and cut hair, “but you could be a 911 operator off the street,” he said. If a local public safety answering point (PSAP) can’t meet a basic minimum standard, “maybe that community shouldn’t be providing 911 service,” he said, suggesting the duty fall on the county or the state. “Complete local control of this national system is probably an idea that’s archaic and needs to be reconsidered."
Eighty-five percent of the country’s PSAPs are five seats or less, said David Furth, deputy chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau. It’s important to look at the transition from a regional perspective instead of treating each piece in isolation, he said. There shouldn’t be “a small group of PSAPs that are haves and a large group of PSAPs that are have-nots,” he said. IP gives the potential to “share the wealth” from a technological point of view.
"Cheap, deployable beacons” could help public safety officials determine the indoor location of 911 callers, said FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne. A “Bluetooth beacon” could be placed in exit signs, or in the Wi-Fi spots installed throughout buildings, Schulzrinne said. Those kinds of low-energy Bluetooth devices are already used today for advertising purposes and delivering coupons to a nearby user, he said. “It would seem very sad if we could locate somebody to deliver a latte coupon to them, but we cannot find them when there is an emergency."
The switch to IP will offer challenges along with the opportunities, said Wade Witmer, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System Division. While IP technologies will let PSAPs talk to more people simultaneously while also providing more diverse content, the “burden of that falls upon the person who’s creating that message,” Witmer said. The 911 operator that responds to a distress call has the challenge of knowing what needs to go in there, he said. “It’s a training and education and assistance problem."
Access network providers will have a “very large role to play,” particularly as it relates to location, said Trey Forgety, director-government affairs at the National Emergency Number Association. But “we can’t lose sight of the fact that the OSPs matter just as much,” he said of originating service providers. When Forgety gets text messages through Apple’s iMessage service rather than through a traditional carrier, “there’s another entity that needs to be involved” so 911 text responses work seamlessly and transparently for the end user, he said. “The world is becoming increasingly disaggregated.” When people don’t use the underlying carrier’s network at all, it’s important to make it as easy and low-cost as possible for originating service providers to get to next-generation 911, “and that we don’t break anything in the process,” he said.
It gets even more complicated as you have OSPs crossing state lines, said David Simpson, Public Safety Bureau chief. “We potentially will arrive at a point where we have significant have and have-not communities,” he said. What should the public expect in the variation in response they will get as they drive across the country? he asked. It’s important to look at the problem not through the lens of the most well-resourced PSAPs, but of the “least-resourced PSAPs,” to determine “what degree of variation is acceptable for our society,” he said.