Improved location accuracy of 911 calls could save approximately 10,000 lives and $92 billion annually, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
At a value of $9 million per life, there is a practical and economical need to fix the issue, officials say, but the competing financial interests of cellphone providers, law enforcement and legislators stunt reform to a near halt.
Concern for the infrastructural flaw has been raised at various points in the last two decades, most notably in 1999, when Congress “called for a system that would use the best technology available to deliver emergency assistance.”
Since then, an increasing reliance on wireless networks has created new problems yet to be fixed.
Unlike traditional landlines, which automatically identify most locations, the same process is not applicable for wireless calls that are traced to cellphone towers, and that makes it difficult for emergency dispatchers to pinpoint a caller’s location.
For one, most cellphone-tracking methods still in use today rely on triangulation, which locates callers by measuring the distance between each cellphone tower that picks up the emergency call.
And while this method can generally pinpoint someone’s location within 300 square meters, an Atlantic article said, locating someone on a dense city block or in an apartment building is still difficult.
According to The Times of Northwest Indiana, Brian Hitchcock, the director of Lake County’s emergency services, said he wants the FCC to enforce its rules on cellphone service providers who do not comply with global positioning standards, but the process has been slow.
What’s the holdup?
It is true that, in the present, simple acts such as ordering a pizza or purchasing the next best selling novel are made seamless through location-based software. In this sense, smartphone GPS technology has been suggested as a potential solution for the 911 location problem.
Nonetheless, officials calling for reform, like Roger Hixson, the technical director of the National Emergency Number Association, said 911 has to operate accurately for all its users, not just individuals with smartphones.
Instead, Hixson’s organization called for the FCC to revise federal regulations for the 911 system in 2010, and, after more debates involving lobbyists on both sides, the FCC passed new rules, crafted in part by the cellphone carriers themselves.
The final deal stipulated accurate location data 40 percent of the time by 2017 and an 80 percent accuracy rate by 2021, target goals that have been criticized for their seemingly low expectations. However, the FCC noted the current rate of accuracy in 2016 is below 40 percent nationally, meaning any sign of growth would be a positive trend.
Also, the requirement for finding callers within a multi-story building labeled “vertical location” will reportedly be phased in at a later date.
In the end, while communities wait for federal laws and cellphone services to catch up, emergency dispatch services are left in the dark.
As for Marion County, Katie Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, said cellular 911 calls received by their dispatchers are geographically located using “Phase 2” programming technology.
AT&T, the vendor for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office dispatch unit, uses “Phase 2” to identify cellphone calls within hundreds of feet, which coincides triangulation methods locating individuals within 300 square meters, or nearly 1,000 feet.
In most cases, such as a caller stating their exact address, this may not be an issue, but in moments when a caller cannot, having access to better location technology or text messages and photos, for instance, can save some of the 10,000 lives lost, officials from the FCC say.
