The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Thursday announced a proposal to improve 911 service by making it easier for first responders to find callers in need.
The agency proposed a new regulation that would revise a requirement that wireless service providers provide location information with all 911 calls that identifies the caller’s horizontal and vertical location within specified accuracy thresholds, which are validated in an independent test bed. All four of the FCC’s current commissioners voted in favor.
The FCC explained that while the vertical location data is helpful for first responders to locate the 911 caller in multistory buildings, public safety authorities have expressed concerns about the level of precision of the vertical location data and the adequacy of the test bed.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recounted in a statement how a few years ago, he spent time at a Fairfax County, Virginia, fire station to better understand how location technology aids first responders in their jobs. Carr said the firefighters “emphasized the importance of 911 solutions that can help them quickly locate both victims and fellow first responders during emergency situations.”
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“Shortly after that visit, the FCC adopted rules that made it much easier for first responders to find callers in apartments and office buildings,” Carr said. “But our real-life experience since then shows that there are still too many instances when our first responders are not getting the actionable location information they need in emergency situations.”
Carr added that this new proposal looks to remedy that problem by building upon the FCC’s “prior work on location accuracy to ensure that first responders receive not just accurate information, but actionable information.”
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Under the proposal, wireless providers would be required to deliver vertical information to 911 call centers measured in Height Above Ground Level (AGL), rather than Height Above Ellipsoid (HAE), to provide more actionable information.
The industry test bed would be required to validate the performance of vertical information technologies in dense urban, urban, suburban and rural environments – rather than the current approach of aggregating or averaging performance across environments.
The proposal would also give non-nationwide wireless providers and some major public safety organizations broader access to the test bed data and allow those public safety authorities to challenge test bed validations.
The FCC’s proposed rulemaking also seeks comment on ways to improve the number of wireless 911 calls that convey dispatchable location data with the call itself, as well as improving horizontal location accuracy for wireless 911 calls and location accuracy for text-to-911.
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