This article originally appeared in the August issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY
Someone just broke into my apartment. I am in the closet; I don’t want them to hear me. I sent a text message with the guy’s picture to 911. Where are the police?
Unfortunately, today’s 911 technology is not capable of receiving text messages. However, in the immediate near future, that capability and much more is coming with the deployment of Next Generation 911. NG911 is being designed to incorporate emergency calls for service from both traditional telephone devices like land line and cellular telephones and non-traditional methods including text, instant messaging, pictures and video.
The technology that makes these new capabilities possible changes the way 911 calls are handled within the telephone companies today. NG911 calls for SIP-based messaging on private, secure, emergency service Internet protocol-based networks. An easy way to understand the capabilities of SIP is to think of a freight train, where each car can carry a different piece of information, like a street number, JPEG file, or latitude and longitude. At the public safety answering point, new technology will be deployed that has the ability to unload the SIP train. You are probably already using SIP as part of your communications technology toolkit. When you use Microsoft’s (News 
- Alert) Skype to communicate with someone, whether IM, voice, or video, the underlying technology is based on SIP messaging.
As we move from the circuit-based telephony environment to the world of voice over IP and SIP messaging, a migration path has to support both technologies, seamlessly. There cannot be one moment where calls to 911 cannot be routed, processed, and delivered to the PSAP. That’s why the National Emergency Number Association recently approved its i3 standard for key elements of NG911 systems.
As enterprises and emergency communications professionals begin the migration to NG911, proven technologies using gateways to both move between analog and digital voice and to handle and deliver the ALI or location data from the legacy world into the NG911 environment will ease the transition.
Jerry Eisner, ENP, is group director for public safety at RedSky (News - Alert) Technologies (www.redskyE911.com).
TMCnet publishes expert commentary on various telecommunications, IT, call center, CRM and other technology-related topics. Are you an expert in one of these fields, and interested in having your perspective published on a site that gets several million unique visitors each month? Get in touch.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
