Carriers Commit to 911 Call Location Accuracy

Imagine that you are looking for a lost koala bear in an area the size of an Olympic stadium. Now imagine the cuddly little guy is injured or unconscious and needs immediate medical care. That’s about the kind of challenge that faces your average EMT when you make an indoor call to 911 using your cell phone. This shortfall was first brought to light this summer in an article by the Washington Post, and the FCC immediately stepped up and told the US carriers that they would need to provide a ‘dispatchable location’ (which not only includes address, but floor, suite, apartment or similar information) for all indoor-calls within two years. According to a press release published earlier this week on FierceWireless, the carriers and the CTIA have responded to the FCC with a timeline for meeting the FCC’s request. Here’s what they are estimating for when calls will have embedded indoor location information:

• 40% of all wireless 911 calls within two years;
• 50% of all wireless 911 calls within three years
• 75% of all VoLTE wireless 911 calls within five years
• 80% of all VoLTE wireless 911 calls within six years

The proposed solution will use not only the coarse location from cell phone towers, but also Wifi signals and Bluetooth technology to provide better location information. In contrast, currently more than 9 out of 10 phone calls to 911 from cell phones don’t include accurate location information–resulting in EMTs having to search an area roughly the size of three to five city blocks’ worth of buildings. This article by GPSTracklog estimated that position accuracy for each of the four carriers varied greatly with Verizon at the top, with 24.6% of wireless calls providing precise location, while AT&T had the worst rate at only 2.6%. The National Center for Health Statistics has reported that 41% of U.S. households depend solely on wireless voice services and do not have a landline.]]>