Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service

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21

Why not standardize this across the board for all access devices? As an example if my Broadband provider was required to enter
location information in my cable modem so that when I connected a VOIP device (ATA, IAD, PC, etc) it would query the first IP device
it encountered and gather location data that would solve a lot of these problems. Any solution can be circumvented so no solution
will be perfect, but this idea seems easy enough to accomplish with existing technology. It would even fix the VPN connection issue,
unless the user was purposefully trying to obfuscate himself in which case I don't think we are necessarily concerned about his
ability to contact emergency services.

Shane

22

Forget defeat, just look at the normal margin of error...

Forget fixed-line services, location is easy to solve for that. Let's look
at
things like a guy sitting on a mountain top with a BBQ grill antenna, and
amp,
and a WiFi card. I could make VOIP calls from Apple's public Wireless
network
from 25 miles away on top of Loma Prietta if I wanted to. (In fact, I did
once,
just to test it). If someone put a wireless bridge up there, then, I could
make
the same call from downtown Monterey. The first IP device would still be in
Cupertino. I'd be in a different county (at least 2 counties away), in a
different LATA, and, in completely different CHP dispatch zones. Even CDF
would expect me to be talking to a different dispatch center.

Doing this right is not only hard, but, it's also just not that desirable in
my opinion. It's a huge invasion of privacy as far as I'm concerned.

Owen

23

I don't know all that much about commercial VOIP service or GPS, but it seems to me I've just read lots and lots of messages citing weird cases where locating a VOIP phone won't work well as evidence that the whole idea is a failure, while none of those cases appear to have much to do with the problem that people have been trying to solve. The end result of this is that a bunch of people who have loudly written the problem off as impossible then start loudly complaining that those working on the problem didn't ask them how to do it.

The basic problem, if I understand correctly, is this: For the last several years, anybody picking up phone installed in a reasonably standard way and calling 911 could expect that if weren't able to explain where they were, the police would show up anyway. It was hard to see this as espionage or as a civil liberties violation -- the wire goes where the wire goes.

Now we've got competition among providers of wire line residential phone service, and the competitors are mostly VOIP companies who provide their service over the users' cable modems. Since this service is being marketed as equivalent to regular home phone service, and used that way by lots of its customers, it seems reasonable to expect that calling 911 from it would work the same way. There's a minor problem -- the VOIP carrier often doesn't provide the wire, and thus doesn't know where the wire goes -- but that seems easy enough to get around. The simplest way to do it would be to ask two questions when the service gets installed: Is it going to be used in a fixed location, and if so, where? Asking the same questions again whenever the billing address changes should keep this reasonably up to date.

There are, of course, other ways to do this, which might also work. Whether GPS in the ATA box will work has already been discussed to death here. Requiring the cable or DSL providers to map IP addresses to installed locations would presumably also work, although with many more layers of complexity to go through to have useful information accompany a phone call. Anyhow, I'm sure if we leave those questions to those who have to implement it, they'll figure out something that doesn't require too much completely extraneous work on their parts.

There are, of course, VOIP installations where this won't work. I use a VOIP soft phone through a gateway in San Francisco to call the US from countries where using my US cell phone is expensive, and there are plenty of other people who use VOIP phones in much the same way. Owen maybe isn't quite unique in his bizarre scenario of trying to hide his location by using his wi-fi phone via repeaters from two counties away from the base station. But these scenarios aren't at all relevant to the problem at hand. If I need urgent help in a hotel room in a foreign country, I'll grab the hotel phone and call somebody local rather than trying to patch a call through to the US via my computer. And if Owen were to die because he deliberately hid his location when calling 911 and the ambulance couldn't find him, it would be hard to argue that it would be anybody's fault but Owen's.

At some point it makes sense to solve the problems you can solve, rather than inventing new ones.

Yes, this ignores the cell phone issue, which seems rather different because they're almost always portable. It's already had years of work put into it, and doesn't need to be reinvented here.

-Steve

24

True enough. However, the tough problems are always the ones you never thought of before you started building the system. Therefore, it helps to try to come up with as many scenarios as you can, and try to find the various weaknesses in the system. You might decide to not try to do anything to fix them, but you should at least be aware of them.

  For example, one example came to me tonight -- get a CDMA mobile phone with EV-DO and a flat-rate subscription, then run a SIP/VOIP softphone over that. Yes, the cost of the EV-DO flat rate is high, but a few short duration long distance calls per month could very easily exceed the monthly rate you'd pay. And in times of trouble, people frequently grab the device they're most familiar with, and not necessarily the right one for the job at hand.

  In the case of regular cell phones, if you are roaming on a network in a foreign country, or you have rented a local phone, I understand that the carriers have gotten together and made sure that the various 911/112/999 emergency services numbers work world-wide, so that if you're an American in Europe, you can still call 911 and have that work as expected.

  But in the case of the EV-DO softphone, things get nastier. And I can see companies deciding to go with a dedicated EV-DO softphone, to save on overall expenses.

25

Given that there are UK telephone numbers starting 911, this seems
rather unlikely. By way of example, and to bring VoIP back into the
discussion, Bristol (0117) 911 xxxx numbers all belong to Magrathea
who appear to be the main VoIP-to-PSTN wholesaler for the UK.

AFAIAA, Magrathea don't offer access to 112/999, but this is no great
loss given that mobile phones are cheap, ubiqitous, and work pretty
much everywhere in the UK. Even hermits have them :slight_smile:

26

When I worked with Oftel on the design of the new UK numbering schemes,
one of my strongest recommendations was for certain prefixes, including
911, to be ringfenced from all local numbering schemes - for exactly
the reasons that you are now pointing to.

Sadly Oftel were never known for their ability to understand reasoned
argument within the technical arena ...

A current, and related, problem is the introduction of emergency SMS
messaging from cellphones ... a very necessary feature for deaf people
to use, where they cannot access a text/relay service (eg when they are
in a foreign country)

Of course, the design of GSM predicates that such messages will go to
the message center in their home country, and as things stand would be
routed from there to the home country emergency services, regardless
of where in the world the user actually is!

27

Peter Corlett wrote:

28

Cite?

(This isn't my experience at all, although obviously it's possible that the very few occasions I've had to test this have just been localised inability to implement the arrangement you describe.)

(Emergency services are obtained by dialling 111 in New Zealand, for the record, just to make your list a little more complete. The physical act of dialling 111 in New Zealand on a rotary phone was the same as dialling 999 in England, however, since the dials in each country were numbered in opposite directions; a New Zealand "1" and an English "9" were both sent as nine pulses.)

(Not that any of this has much to do with network operations.)

Joe

29

My experience is that the mobile network operators (in Europe and the
USA (GSM) anyway) are lumping all of these together, so that no matter
which you dial, you get the emergency service they connect you to.
They added to the list of "special" numbers, with a many-to-one
mapping of number to service.

30

Scott W Brim <swb@employees.org> writes:

    In the case of regular cell phones, if you are roaming on a
network in a foreign country, or you have rented a local phone, I
understand that the carriers have gotten together and made sure that
the various 911/112/999 emergency services numbers work world-wide, so
that if you're an American in Europe, you can still call 911 and have
that work as expected.

Cite?

(This isn't my experience at all ...

My experience is that the mobile network operators (in Europe and the
USA (GSM) anyway) are lumping all of these together, so that no matter
which you dial, you get the emergency service they connect you to.
They added to the list of "special" numbers, with a many-to-one
mapping of number to service.

The 112 emergency number is required by the GSM spec to work at all
times, no matter what. This includes e.g. dialling with keypad lock
enabled or without a valid sim card.

Some phone manufacturers and/or operators have extended this to
include 911 and other commonly used emergency numbers, but I don't
think those are part of the spec.

The requirement was probably included to satisfy european regulatory
authorities who actively participated in the standardisation work in
ETSI at the time.

Bj�rn

31

Peter Corlett wrote:

[...]

AFAIAA, Magrathea don't offer access to 112/999, but this is no
great loss given that mobile phones are cheap, ubiqitous, and work
pretty much everywhere in the UK. Even hermits have them :slight_smile:

Given the recent London experience should mobiles be used as a
backup to proper land lines…???

112/999 takes priority over regular calls. There doesn't seem to be
any evidence that calls to 999 from mobiles were any more prone to
failure than those from landlines.

32

112 takes priority at all levels. 999 will get priority once the call
reaches a basestation, but won't override congestion in the radio path.

33

Even for fixed, US, residential VoIP, there's another problem: service availability. With cell phones, people expect dropped calls and sketchy service, and understand misrouted calls to local operators/emergency services. It's part of the deal.

But a land line? If I pick up an analog phone anywhere, I expect a dial tone, and local calling. If I don't have access to emergency services after a blackout/natural disaster that knocks cell towers down (think hurricane season in Florida last year) then you'd never get me to drop my local carrier.

I Am Not a Telco Engineer, BUT:
What if part of your monthly VoIP service included a stripped down, leased PSTN line from the carrier? Say, another 2 bucks a month.

What's the opex of a single residential phone line? How much does it cost to have a live copper pair, and how much does it cost to connect said copper to the PSTN? Could local telcos offer nothing but emergency local dialing? Say, 911, hospitals, sheriff's office? Or maybe just local dialing, with a "by the minute" rate to discourage use? Since most residential customers use their ATA's to mimic a single analog line for the whole house anyways, why not add an FXO port to the ATA? Set the ATA to fail over to the analog line if it loses power. Customers get *real* 911 service, and telcos won't be stuck with miles of worthless, buried line. This solves the "babysitter" problem, too: people who don't care how your VoIP setup works; they just expect 911 to do what it's supposed to.

Austin

Steve Gibbard wrote:

34

Austin McKinley wrote:

But a land line? If I pick up an analog phone anywhere, I expect a dial tone, and local calling. If I don't have access to emergency services after a blackout/natural disaster that knocks cell towers down (think hurricane season in Florida last year) then you'd never get me to drop my local carrier.

I think it is quite a bit to expect very high reliability even from
land lines during and immediately following a hurricane. In fact, the
odds may not be bad that your cellular service could be restored before
your land line. Funny thing about blackouts, you're IP phone is dead
if your ISP link depends on utility power. Your cell phone is OK.
Your land line is OK... as long as you don't just have cordless phones
that require a base station that only operates plugged in.

<Gratuitous-Plug=Employer>
If you really want high reliability during and after a natural disaster,
satellite phones are probably your best option. We just opened a new
gateway in Florida, partly due to demand for emergency services support
during hurricane season. (Although I'd rather not slide into the
discussion about how 911 works for us.)
</Gratuitous-Plug>

As any network engineer knows, the best engineered systems still do
fail. Your best bet for reliability is diversity.

35

Crist Clark wrote:

<Gratuitous-Plug=Employer>
If you really want high reliability during and after a natural disaster,
satellite phones are probably your best option.

That's who I thought you worked for, but the only satellite phone provider whose name I consistently remember is Iridium (aren't they bankrupt and/or gone?)

Of course, you have issues with satellite phones too. Cost is one such issue. Even when I signed up for my first cell phone in 1993, long before the wireless boom, airtime was still only about 40 to 50 cents per minute[0] - about 1/2 or 1/3 of what you'll pay per minute for a satellite phone today, IIRC. (Please correct me if necessary!)

Another, potentially worse, problem occurs if you don't have line of sight to the bird... that's precisely why I ended up with cable TV instead of satellite when I lived in Lake County, Ohio - three *very* tall trees to the south of my house, with DirecTV's satellite *and* Dish's satellite both requiring line of sight to the southwest.

during hurricane season. (Although I'd rather not slide into the
discussion about how 911 works for us.)

It doesn't? :wink:

**SJS

[0] All monetary figures quoted here are in US dollars

36

[Well, OK, so I'm being UK-centric, but the same problems apply.]

What's the opex of a single residential phone line? How much does it
cost to have a live copper pair, and how much does it cost to
connect said copper to the PSTN?

If BT is to be believed, slightly *more* than the retail cost of
GBP10.49 a month. I assume that BT expect to recover some of the loss
through call charges or other services. (Not unreasonable - BT
indirectly get a reasonable wedge from my ADSL supplier even if I
don't pay more than the basic line rental.)

Could local telcos offer nothing but emergency local dialing? Say,
911, hospitals, sheriff's office?

Who would decide which numbers go onto the list. What about the
40p/min 070xx numbers that Patientline provide "free" to hospitals?

(070xx is just a sleazy way of sidestepping premium-rate legislation
of 09xx numbers.)

Or maybe just local dialing, with a "by the minute" rate to
discourage use?

Us 10.49 customers pay 3p/min daytime anyway, whether local or to the
other side of the UK :slight_smile:

Since most residential customers use their ATA's to mimic a single
analog line for the whole house anyways, why not add an FXO port to
the ATA? Set the ATA to fail over to the analog line if it loses
power. Customers get *real* 911 service, and telcos won't be stuck
with miles of worthless, buried line.

It's not really worthless, as that's what the broadband comes in on
for pretty much every UK broadband user. (Unlike BT, with NTL and
Telewest you don't *have* to take the voice service, but the price
breaks encourage you to and I suspect it gets installed anyway.)

It seems that the status quo in the UK already gives you pretty much
what you want. I guess that's why, wearing my end-user hat, I've seen
absolutely no effort going on to make 999 work over VoIP.

I think UK users of VoIP still view it as a way of getting dirt cheap
voice minutes by avoiding BT's call rates, rather than as a
replacement phone line. In that vein, would you expect, say, MCI and
all the tinpot long-distance carriers to concern themselves with 911?

37

Steve Sobol wrote:

Crist Clark wrote:

<Gratuitous-Plug=Employer>
If you really want high reliability during and after a natural disaster,
satellite phones are probably your best option.

That's who I thought you worked for, but the only satellite phone provider whose name I consistently remember is Iridium (aren't they bankrupt and/or gone?)

They did go bankrupt, but were bought and still do operate. Of course,
Globalstar went bankrupt and was bought too. The new ownership
has been expanding the Globalstar business (new ground gateways, buying
existing gateways from external service providers, planning launches
to replenish the constellation, etc.). I don't think new-Iridium has
plans to replenish. Both are big on gov't and corporate customers,
but Globalstar is much more popular with smaller customers and consumers.
I'm not impartial, but both services have pros and cons depending
on your needs. But I believe the real thing that kept Iridium going
was some of their DoD customers (i.e. customers that would take the
business over before letting it go under).

Of course, you have issues with satellite phones too. Cost is one such issue. Even when I signed up for my first cell phone in 1993, long
before the wireless boom, airtime was still only about 40 to 50 cents per minute[0] - about 1/2 or 1/3 of what you'll pay per minute for a satellite phone today, IIRC. (Please correct me if necessary!)

Like so many things, price depends on the volume you buy,

   http://www.globalstarusa.com/en/airtime/voicepricing/

The range is from $1 to $0.14 per minute. There are also other special
plans not mentioned including "emergency use only" plans. Although many
of those are individually arranged when large gov't or private agencies
make bulk purchaces of equipment and services. The "Ready-Sat-Go!"
(I didn't name it) plan might be a reasonable emergency package,

   http://www.readysatgo.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_13&products_id=19

<advertisement acting-school="cheesy commercial" empathy-mode="on"
actor="deep-voiced anchorman or Sally Struthers">
Isn't the safety of your family and your peace of mind for one
year worth $999? Then only the cost of pre-paid minutes for the
years after that.
</advertisement>

Another, potentially worse, problem occurs if you don't have line of sight to the bird... that's precisely why I ended up with cable TV instead of satellite when I lived in Lake County, Ohio - three *very* tall trees to the south of my house, with DirecTV's satellite *and* Dish's satellite both requiring line of sight to the southwest.

Trees could potentially cause a problem, but not in the situation
you describe. Globalstar, and Iridium too for that matter, have large
LEO constellations, not GEO. There are typically multiple satellites
in view at any given time, and they are mo-o-oving by. A stand of
trees off in one direction probably is not a problem. OTOH, standing
under solid rain forest canopy may or may not present problems.
Again, an overview from the website,

   http://www.globalstarusa.com/en/content.php?cid=601

during hurricane season. (Although I'd rather not slide into the
discussion about how 911 works for us.)

It doesn't? :wink:

It does, afterall, FCC says it has to. How do we do it? Your GPS coords
are belong to us,

   http://www.globalstarusa.com/en/about/newsevents/press_display.php?pressId=41

But funky things happen when we start talking about international
roaming. (Before any more detailed questions come in, I'll warn you
I'm a terrestrial data networking guy, not a telco switching or RF guy.)

38

Sam Crooks wrote:

Didn't the US Navy buy Iridium?

Nope.

   http://www.iridium.com/corp/iri_corp-story.asp?storyid=2

  "In December 2000, a group of private investors led by Dan Colussy
   organized Iridium Satellite LLC which acquired the operating assets
   of the bankrupt Iridium LLC including the satellite constellation,
   the terrestrial network, Iridium real property and intellectual
   capital."

39

Sadly, your suggestion is rational and valid, but not likely to happen.

The official "cost" of a copper pair is on the order of $25 to $50 per month, depending on the effectiveness of the lobbyists.

"Wait?!", you say, "how is that possible if regular phone service is only sold for $15 per month?"

Ah, you see they claim that they lose money on their service while simultaneously posting record profits. That is because business is horrible and/or great depending on whether legislators or shareholders are in the room. ILECs are not bound by the laws of the regular universe.

But wild political machinations aside: operationally, using copper pairs cannot be used the way you described for ... reasons.

John

40

world-wide, so that if you're an American in Europe, you can still
call 911 and have that work as expected.

Given that there are UK telephone numbers starting 911, this seems
rather unlikely.

Given that we're talking about cell phones, it seems completely
likely. Cell phones present the dialed number as a block, so there's
no ambiguity between 911 and 911XXXXX. I don't know whether UK cell
carriers map 911 to 112, but there's no technical reason they can't do
so.

I agree that for VoIP using normal phones through adapters, 911 in the
UK won't work.