TORONTO – There were a spasm of news stories just after the holidays that highlighted the need for better emergency 911 service for wireless phones in Canada.
There have been a few accidents, and in one case, a fatality, that might have been averted if emergency personnel had been better able to pinpoint where a wireless caller was at the time they called.
And there is no doubt that better 911 service for wireless phones is, of course, a necessity here in Canada.
However, the stories in the consumer press centred on how the wireless industry in Canada hasn’t wanted to spend to make the required upgrades, how the industry is well behind the rest of the world on this issue and the only reason why wireless companies are not moving forward on a better 911 solution is that they don’t want to pay for it.
All this stung the folks at Rogers Communications, because they say that’s just not so. In fact, none of the reporters who have done broadcast, print or Internet reports on the issue have even tried to contact Rogers Communications to talk about the issue, Ken Englehart, RCI’s SVP, regulatory told Cartt.ca in an interview.
“I would have thought that in journalism school they teach you to phone up the different people involved and no one ever called us to ask us about it,” said Englehart.
If they’d have called, they would have found out that Rogers is on the cusp of rolling out what it’s calling “phase two” of e911 service for its wireless customers. “We started working on it 18 months ago and we’ll be ready for deployment at approximately the end of May (2009),” added Englehart.
“So, this idea that somehow it hasn’t been built because we wanted someone else to pay for it is just factually incorrect.”
The CRTC, according to a Globe and Mail story on this issue earlier this month, is apparently about to order all Canadian wireless carriers to make sure their 911 service is state of the art by February of 2010, so that people lost in a snowstorm, or who crash their car well off the road, can still be found by emergency personnel. Englehart says he’s heard nothing from the Commission so far.
And, as more and more people swap a land line for a wireless phone only, better 911 is an absolute must. “We think it’s an important thing to do for our customers,” added Englehart.
Bob Berner, EVP and chief technical officer for Rogers Wireless, bristled at the reports which made the rounds (most of which can easily be found with the help of Google. Sadly, you’ll see the only original piece of journalism was the Globe story. The rest were mainly commentary and other piffle built off the Globe piece or other rumour and innuendo some writer picked up on a blog or somesuch).
“I’ve been with Rogers since the beginning of Rogers Wireless and the first thing we did in 1985 was deploy what we could for emergency response. So, if anybody called 911, even though there was no regulation or no process, we worked with – at the time before 911 service – every local police department, OPP, or RCMP detachment,” recalled Berner. “We automatically translated and routed calls based on the cell site it came from to the nearest RCMP, OPP or municipal police detachment.”
Years later, Rogers and the other wireless carriers deployed what they call phase one e911 – which was the ability to automatically send the calling number to the emergency service bureau along with a cell site identifier so that responder would be able to take that information and come up with the general area of the caller – assuming that caller can’t physically tell the operator where he or she is.
And while that exists in Canada with Rogers, Telus and Bell, the various PSAPs (public safety answering points) across the country each make their own decisions on the hardware and software they use to sync with the telecom providers.
“In big chunks of Canada there isn’t even phase one 911 – the wireless carriers are ready but the PSAPs are not,” said Englehart.
Phase two of e911 service, which Rogers is testing right now, is improved technology that can send far more accurate information using a combination of satellite GPS and radio triangulation to find where the cell phone caller, and the emergency, is.
As anyone with a GPS knows, it can be very reliable, as long as tree cover isn’t too thick or you’re not too deep in a valley, for example.
“Just like your handheld GPS receiver sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t depending on where you are, so will the handset be able to be as accurate,” explained Berner. “When it is accurate, it’s very accurate. When (GPS) is not accurate (or the handset doesn’t have GPS capability), it reverts to network triangulation which is less accurate. We are in the process of deploying it so it’ll be commercially available at the end of May.”
While triangulation won’t pinpoint the user exactly, it is far better than simply transmitting the nearest cell site to emergency personnel.
(And this technology has marketing uses, too. While there has been little advertiser interest so far here, other countries have used the technology so that, for example, when a wireless network detects that a customer is near a shoe store the telco has a contract with, the customer might automatically be sent a notice of a store special or even a personal coupon, to entice them to find the nearby store – with the help of their smart phone’s mapping software, of course – and make a purchase. Heck, in some places, you can even use your phone as an e-wallet to make that purchase, but that’s another story.)
The primary problem that will arise though, even when Rogers and the others activate this new technology (we don’t know how far along Bell and Telus are) is that the PSAPs may or may not be able to use the data. They’ll need upgrades – and that part comes from taxpayers.
“What has to happen next is that the PSAPs have to have the ability to receive the positioning co-ordinates,” added Berner. “So various PSAPs, depending on who their suppliers are or what techniques they choose to use will be able to do that in the same time frame that we’re ready, but others won’t. They’re going to have to upgrade their systems.”
And as for Canada being behind “the rest of the world”, as many of the stories stated? The only country Canada is behind is the U.S., and that’s because the Federal Communications Commission there forced the wireless companies to deploy phase two e911.
And while it looks as though a deadline will be set, soon, here in Canada, local PSAPs appear to have some work to do, too.
