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No Signal-- Cellphone Hangup: When You Dial 911, Can Help Find You?
The Wall Street Journal
May 12, 2005
In November 1993, Jennifer Koon, under attack by a vicious assailant, dialed 911 from her cellphone. But the dispatcher in upstate New York could only listen helplessly for 20 minutes as the 18-year-old, unable to give her exact location, was beaten, driven to an alley and shot to death. The technology wasn't available to find her.
Almost 12 years later, more than half of the U.S. still lacks the technology to find cellphone callers in distress. Though the federal government is spending billions of dollars annually on homeland security, the 911 system that Americans rely on to report an emergency hasn't benefited.
With the explosive growth of wireless technology, more than a third of the 190 million calls placed to 911 each year now come from cellphones. Even as some of the nation's biggest cellular carriers face a December deadline to upgrade their systems for 911 calls, many emergency-call centers won't be able to receive the data. Virtually all of the nation's 6,000 call centers can locate land-line phones, but only 41% of them can locate cellphones, public-safety officials say. And the situation is getting worse with the growing popularity of Internet-based phone services -- some of which can't access traditional 911 service.
No federal agency has the authority to drive the local, state and federal governments, as well as dozens of wireless and local-phone companies, toward a solution. The cellular industry initially reacted slowly because of costs and liability concerns. Public-safety officials estimate it would take $8 billion and at least four more years to modernize the nation's 911 system for wireless calls. And that doesn't include the costs of updating the system to handle Internet phone services.
Meanwhile, cash-strapped states have diverted funds earmarked for 911 to balance budgets and pay for unrelated items, including winter boots and dry cleaning for the New York State Police. While Congress passed a law last year to pay for some upgrades and stop the state raids on 911 money, President Bush, facing his own budget problems, has declined to fund that initiative.
"These are front-burner challenges getting back-burner treatment," says Michael Copps, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. "The government itself is still working on developing a nationwide plan. It just does not exist yet."
According to the latest information compiled by the National Emergency Number Association, a nonprofit corporation focused on public-safety communications issues, only six states, plus the District of Columbia, have the technology in place to find 911 wireless callers from most places in the state. Three more are close to completion. Sixteen states, including New Jersey, Arizona and Ohio, have upgraded less than 10% of their counties, NENA says. Six of those states haven't finished a single county.
Even within many states, coverage is uneven, with some counties and cities receiving upgrades while neighboring ones haven't. A modernized call center in the South Side of Chicago, for example, often helps locate cellphone callers in nearby cities where emergency operators lack the technology to do it themselves.
Big Shift
Part of the 911 problem is the result of a vast shift among consumers away from traditional fixed-line phones toward new technologies. Older phones are easy to find because they are plugged into the wall at a specific address and aren't moveable. When a 911 call is made from that number, the location automatically pops up on the computer screen in front of the call-center operator who answers.
But consumers increasingly favor cellular and Internet services because they offer cheaper rates and greater mobility -- the very thing that makes callers difficult to find. About 6% of the nation's 182 million cellphone users have gotten rid of their home phones, according to industry analysts, who say the percentage will continue to rise.
Technology offers two ways to pinpoint wireless callers. Global Positioning System satellites can be used to find the caller if cellphones are equipped with a special chip, and the local 911 center has been upgraded to receive specific latitude and longitude data. That's the system being used by Verizon Wireless, Nextel Communications Inc. and Sprint Corp. Two other major cellular companies, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telecom AG, are using triangulation -- measuring the distance of a signal from three different cellphone towers -- to locate 911 callers.
But these technologies face challenges. Cellular providers using GPS have to get their customers to buy a new phone equipped with a special computer chip for their location system to work. In March, a man died in a Long Island snowstorm after calling 911 from an older cellphone that couldn't transmit his coordinates, even though the local call center had satellite-locator technology. Triangulation has proved problematic in rural areas, where towers, if there are any, are often built in straight lines along highways. That makes it difficult to get three separate measures to locate a 911 caller.
The FCC has set a year-end deadline for Verizon, Nextel and Sprint to upgrade nearly all their customers to GPS-enabled phones. But even if the companies persuade people with older phones to upgrade, no similar deadline has been set for local and state governments to get their equipment in place to handle such calls. And no federal agency has the jurisdiction to set one.
Internet-phone services offer an entirely different host of problems. These services allow consumers in, say, Boise, Idaho, to get a phone number with a Boston area code, which raises questions about where a 911 call would be routed. Public-safety officials say new technology is needed to locate the call center nearest the Internet modem making the call, regardless of the phone number.
Some Internet phone services don't let users connect to 911 or they route callers to nonemergency numbers. Earlier this year, a family in Houston with Internet phone service couldn't alert police that two armed robbers had forced their way into the family's home and shot both parents in the legs. When their daughter called 911, she could only get a recorded message to hang up and try a different phone.
Later this month, the FCC is expected to require Vonage Holdings Corp., the nation's biggest Internet phone provider, and others to provide a direct connection to the 911 network, according to commission officials.
To provide a similar level of 911 service as traditional phones, new Internet protocols need to be written to allow the transmission of location data in addition to the voice call. New switching equipment and routers are also needed. The cost would be far less than the wireless 911 upgrade. Several companies are offering middleman solutions to allow Internet phone companies to connect to 911 networks, and Verizon and SBC have said they'll begin offering some direct connections to the 911 networks they run to companies like Vonage.
The difficulties involved in upgrading the system can partly be traced to 911's origin in the late 1960s, when AT&T still ran most of the country's phone service. In 1968, the company decided to make 911 a nationwide emergency number. At that time, Los Angeles County had 50 different phone numbers to reach the police; St. Louis had 32 for police and 57 for fire emergencies, according to the FCC.
Because rescue services fell under local, not federal, oversight, officials in Washington left it to the cities to set up operator centers to receive calls to the new number. It took until the late 1990s before 96% of the U.S. had 911 service, but some 200 counties still don't. Calls to 911 are routed to the nearest emergency call center. Wireless 911 calls generally get routed based on their location when the call is made.
Crowded Scene
The breakup of Ma Bell made the picture even more complicated by spawning dozens of cellular and local-phone companies, all with a role to play in updating the 911 system. In 1996, the FCC called for upgrading the nation's entire system within five years to make it able to pinpoint cellphone callers to within about a 400-foot radius. But regulators didn't tell individual cellular companies and local officials how to accomplish this task, or pay for it. As a result, the deadline wasn't met.
"The wireless carriers were saying, 'We can't do this, our industry is in its infancy and these costs will stifle growth,' " said Anthony Haynes, executive director of the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board. Carriers also worried about liability issues if a 911 call was lost. Congress indemnified them against this in 1999.
Local-phone companies have presented obstacles, too. Excluded from FCC talks outlining the upgrades, some wanted to dictate the technology used in the upgrades to make it compatible with the older systems they already operated for wired phones. Others tried to profit from their role as middlemen between the wireless providers and call centers.
In the greater Kansas City, Mo., area, for example, obtaining wireless 911 service from SBC Communications Inc., which provided regular 911 connections, would have cost an additional $2.5 million a year, says Greg Ballentine, the director of public safety there and president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. So officials opted to buy and manage their own system. An SBC spokesman said the company never made an official proposal for such service.
Even when money has been earmarked for modernizing 911, it often has been used for other purposes. This has been true of funds generated by special fees for upgrading 911 that dozens of states have tacked onto consumers' monthly phone bills.
New York has diverted more of these funds than any other state. It has assessed a fee on monthly phone bills for 911 upgrades since 1991, longer than most states, and has the biggest charge, up to $1.50. But in a March 2002 report, the state comptroller found that the New York State Police in 2001 spent money intended for 911 upgrades on items such as $4.66 million for vehicle leases and purchases, $1.2 million for maintenance of radio systems, $19,187 for winter boots and more than $500 for dry cleaning. State officials said all of the expenses were related to the state police's "public-safety mission," according to a response to the report.
During a training exercise in 2003, Rochester public-safety officials determined police and fire units had responded ably to a simulated gas attack by terrorists at a park concert. According to the drill's script, the attack had been reported to authorities by a citizen with a cellphone.
"What if the person calling was overcome by gas before he could tell them where he is?" asked David Koon, a New York state lawmaker, when briefed on the drill. Mr. Koon, the father of Jennifer, ran for office as an advocate of 911 reform after his daughter's death. (Her killer was eventually caught and sentenced to 37_ years to life in prison.) City officials conceded the call center wouldn't have been able to locate the caller because it lacked the proper technology. Rochester has since upgraded its 911 system.
New York City's 911 problems came under scrutiny in January 2003, when four boys drowned after calling 911 from a sinking rowboat. Rescuers didn't start looking until 14 hours later because they couldn't pinpoint the location of the late-night call. New York City upgraded its 911 system to receive wireless location information last August.
After nearly two years of wrangling, Congress in December 2004 approved the creation of a national oversight office to spearhead 911 upgrades and $250 million a year in federal grants to reward states that don't divert 911 funds to other purposes. At a conference in early March, officials from the Transportation and Commerce departments, which would have jointly run the new central office, said federal belt-tightening made it unlikely that the new funds or new office would materialize anytime soon.
"We're stuck with what we've got," William Belote, chief of the Commerce Department's Emergency Planning and Public Safety Division, told the conference, noting there was only so much he could do with his current five-person staff. The budget deficit, he said, makes it "very, very challenging to get any additional money for the federal grant program."
