VoIP continues to be a thorn in the side of emergency services communications, as Mason Communications recently told a seminar of the British Association of Public Safety Communications Officers (BAPCO).
Key issues that have not been solved include call quality, the inability to dial an emergency number if the network fails, and the fact that the emergency services’ control centre cannot glean location information from a VoIP call.
Ostensibly, some progress has been made. Last November, the European Commission proposed regulatory changes that would require VoIP providers to enable calls to emergency services. The UK’s regulator Ofcom then ruled that type 2 and type 4 suppliers would be required to deliver 999 calls by September 2008 and make location information available too.
Crucially, Ofcom’s statement said that location information has to be provided as far as it is ‘technically feasible’. The problem is there is no reliable, technically feasible way of complying.
At best, there are partial answers to some of these issues. When a 999 call is made, the VoIP service provider knows the unique IP address from which it originates, and that address could be copied into a database and attached to a location. However, this means a supplier would have to ask users to tell it where the VoIP service is used from routinely, but suppliers cannot insist on that information being provided. Also, it is unlikely that a VoIP customer would think to notify their service provider before going on holiday (taking their VoIP service with them), for example.
Despite these flaws, attaching a location to an IP address would work well much of the time, but without regulation suppliers will not do it – indeed they are already resisting any such measures being put in place.
VoIP service providers set up a lobbying group, VON Coalition Europe, in December, with members including Google, Intel, Microsoft and Skype. In a statement made at its launch, the Coalition claimed that the premature application of emergency call rules to VoIP could actually harm public safety, stifle innovations critical to people with disabilities, stall competition, and limit access to innovative and evolving communication options where there is no expectation of placing a 112 call. They defined the scope of VoIP as including web sites, click-to-call services, one-way PSTN voice services and other VoIP services that are not a replacement for traditional home or business phone services.
As VoIP usage continues to grow with no reliable solution for emergency calls in place, user expectation and understanding of the service limitations is key. As BAPCO Seminar Chairman, Rick Abbots concluded earlier this year: “The point is how to educate the public to understand that their technology may not provide them with 999 calls. From an emergency services’ point of view there has to be a response to this issue. If the services are to continue achieving their performance targets, then we need answers to issues such as call identification.”
It’s something of an irony that the receiving end – the emergency services themselves – recognise the benefits of VoIP for their own operation, particularly in terms of flexibility. This is why, for example, the UK’s ambulance services are migrating to use VoIP for their control room communications systems as part of the general migration to the Airwave emergency service radio network.
The new solution enables each ambulance control room to access two central switches located at disparate sites using VoIP technology. So that if one should fail, they can move over instantaneously to another switch. This technology also allows new control rooms to be set up quickly – in a matter of weeks, if necessary – as no central equipment is needed. The only requirement is an IP link to a data centre.
So, while the current lack of location information is frustrating the efforts of the emergency services on the one hand, VoIP is also playing its part in improving public safety through the advances being made to the systems used in the emergency control rooms.
