If your business is located in one or more of the 16 states that have adopted E911 legislation -- mandating that companies install systems providing E911 location information to emergency responders from every end point on the corporate phone system -- then you are no doubt already familiar with the various options that are available to you for complying with these new laws.

But if your company is located in one of the states that are yet to adopt such laws, then you had better prepare – because they will be coming – and you will have some important technology decisions to make.

One of the things that will likely be misleading – at least at first – is that you will be told by the various PBX (News - Alert)/IP-PBX vendors that their phone systems already come with E911 capability “pre-integrated.” Initially that will give you the impression you don’t have to do anything – that the phone system you purchased already has E911 connectivity fully covered.

Well, not exactly.

As explained by Nick Maier, senior vice president of E911 solutions provider RedSky, in our ongoing series, what most phone system makers today are providing is simple “baseline” E911 connectivity – which means the phone system relays only basic information to the 911 Emergency Center, also known as the Public Service Access Point (News - Alert) (PSAP), such as the name of the business and the street address for the building. But that falls far short of what today’s state laws are requiring – today’s E911 laws require that organizations install additional systems, integrated with the phone system, which can relay more detailed location information. In other words, not just the street address from where the call originated, but which specific phone or extension.

This is critical for emergency workers to precisely locate trapped victims in corporate facilities, including corporate campuses, when emergencies such as fires occur. It’s not enough for emergency workers to know the main address – they need to know exactly where the call originated from – which phone, on which floor, in which building, in which quadrant or wing, etc.

So how is RedSky (News - Alert) reacting to the fact that so many of the major phone system makers are touting their “bundled” or integrated E911 connectivity features?

“What most of these manufacturers are selling is really just baseline 911 functionality – or in some cases they offer additional software that only works with their products – which doesn’t really help organizations with ‘mixed’ telephony environments (which most have),” Maier said, further adding that this “baseline” functionality isn’t enough to meet E911 compliance mandates in states where they are implemented.

“Platform providers including Nortel, Avaya (News - Alert) and Cisco have had, as a necessity -- and as a check box on the RFP -- to say ‘yes, we have 911 capability’ – in other words they’ve had to provide at least baseline E911 capability in their call servers,” Maier explained. “And what those baseline capabilities really are is the ability to recognize an emergency dial string. The other capability is, what does the number (i.e. caller ID) look like that comes out from my PBX – and how do I build that out? This is the ten-digit number that the 911 Emergency Center sees.”

For example, Cisco (News - Alert) -- which basically skipped digital phones and went right to IP phones -- developed its own product, called CER (Cisco Emergency Responder).

“What CER does is it uses the two techniques – it uses the network regions approach, that lets you build a network mapping table, and support network regions – and it does Layer 2 discovery, where you can actually talk to switches on the Cisco network and find the port that the phone is on,” Maier explained. “But CER is limited in that it only works with Cisco – your Layer 2 switches have to all be at the same level across the enterprise – and it doesn’t support any other systems. Whereas the RedSky philosophy is: We integrate with anybody’s call server – thus giving you one system to support your hybrid network. That’s very attractive to enterprises – especially larger enterprises – because they typically have platforms from multiple providers. They’ve grown through acquisition – and the parts aren’t all on the same revenue level – you can imagine the various scenarios.”

These baseline capabilities mean that these PBXs can only tell a 911 center what number is calling – they cannot provide any detailed location data. Furthermore they can’t put that data into a NENA2 (National Emergency Number Association) format and forward it to ALI (Automatic Location Information) databases.

“That is a primary reason why a product like RedSky is required – so it can create and manage those location records,” Maier said. “Because without location records, E911 means nothing – you’re going to get a call, but no location data is going to come up.”

(Be sure to check out Part 5 – the final installment – of this ongoing series next week here on the E911 channel.)