911 for the 21st century

The FCC recently voted to require VoIP providers to offer full 911 support.

Obviously, my initial libertarian reaction is that the government should butt out and let consumers choose the phone service they like. If 911 service is important to them, they can choose a provider that offers it. If none do, they can stick with good old Plain Old Telephone Service. No one is being forced to get VoIPed.

But I think it’s not crazy to argue that 911 service is one of those things you don’t really think about until you need it, and then it’s too late. Moreover, one can’t always tell if one has 911 service–you can’t exactly call 911 to find out if the service is working. So I’m not sure I’m necessarily opposed to a 911 mandate as such. In the POTS world, at least, it’s minimally intrusive and probably saves lives.

However, VoIP poses some fresh challenges, primarily because as an end-to-end, packet switching network, it’s very difficult to determine the physical location of a call’s point of origin. There isn’t a monolithic phone company that owns both ends of the system. That means that it’s going to be difficult for VoIP providers to set things up so that the 911 operator can see the physical address of the caller.

The problem is particularly acute because VoIP phones are inherently mobile. All you need is an Internet connection, and any Internet connection, anywhere in the world, will do equally well. That means that the methods of the traditional telephone company, where the phone company matches your address to your phone number when you sign up, simply won’t work.

The only way I can think of to fix the problem is that the VoIP phone itself has to tell the 911 operator’s system where it is. I don’t know enough about VoIP protocols to know if this functionality exists, but I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to add if not.

The hard problem is how the VoIP phone itself knows where it is. Asking the user to enter the address manually won’t work well enough– users are lazy, and are unlikely to update it as they move from home to home. Even worse, some users will probably want to use VoIP from their laptops at a variety of locations. They are unlikely to be happy about having to re-enter their address every time they plug into a new Internet connection.

It seems like the right solution is for the local network to tell the VoIP phone where it is. If you’ll pardon the geeky technical jargon, perhaps existing protocols could be extended to accomodate this functionality. DNS or DHCP come to mind: either type of server could have a “where am I?” feature which returns the physical address of the computer. This could be set by the system administrator, who could probably automate the process for large networks. When a VoIP application launches, it can fire of a query that says “Hey, what’s my physical address” and then use that when a 911 call is made.

The security risk would be minimal, as the server could be limited to only talk to machines on its own subnet. And this same facility could be used for other purposes as well: it could indicate the timezone and daylight savings policy, for example.

So I guess the question is whether an FCC mandate helps or hinders the development of such functionality. I’m afraid that an FCC mandate to get 911 to “work” will simply push Vonage to offer a 911 service that gives out some address even if it’s not the right address. They could claim that that’s the best they can do and throw up their hands.

On the other hand, creating a new, universal, address look-up service will require overcoming a tremendous amount of inertia. My suggestion would require adoption by the majority of ISPs to be effective. Perhaps having the FCC breathing down their necks would spur VoIP companies to persuade ISPs to adopt such lookup software more quickly.

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