FCC Tests a Way to Improve Locating Wireless 911 Callers Indoors, Public Safety Officials Say

Public safety officials said Wednesday they hope an upcoming test being done by the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) will give them factual, documented evidence of the current limits of technology they use to determine the location of people using mobile phones dial 911. The testbed, set to be used next month at locations around San Francisco, will examine how those technologies perform in a variety of locations in urban, suburban and rural areas, said Patrick Donovan, an attorney adviser for the policy division of the FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. CSRIC will draft a report based on those tests in March, including recommendations to help improve the accuracy of indoor location tracking. CSRIC began developing the test bed after it realized data on indoor location accuracy was limited, Donovan said.

Experts and officials in the field already know from anecdotal evidence that 911 call centers -- public-safety answering points (PSAPs) -- have trouble getting an accurate location for callers on mobile phones who use 911 indoors, said Kathy McMahon, interim director of communications center and 911 services for the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO). If a caller is not sure where he is located, a PSAP is left to determine the location based on the information it gets from tracking technology, said Roger Hixson, technical issues director for the National Emergency Number Association. “That’s not always where they are,” he said. Hixson recently spoke with a public safety official in Louisiana who noted a particularly wide disparity between location accuracy when he tested indoors and outdoors. When the official was outside, his location was accurate to within 15 meters; when the official was more than 2 feet into an indoor location, his location displayed as being half a mile away from where he actually was, Hixson said. Indoor accuracy can be much better than that based on a variety of factors, but it remains consistently inaccurate because the technology PSAPs currently use to track wireless 911 callers was not developed with indoor use in mind, he said. The FCC requires wireless carriers to be able to provide a location for 911 callers that’s accurate within 300 meters or less, but those rules currently only apply to calls made at an outdoor location, Donovan said.

There’s a wide disparity between current 911 tracking technology and the public’s perception of what PSAPs can find out about a caller’s location, McMahon said. Technology used outside of the public safety realm can so accurately track the location of a mobile phone that advertisements can pop up related to a particular business as someone passes by, she said. “The logical expectation is that when something is going wrong, the people that you need help from are going to know exactly where you are because the technology that’s available is going to provide that information to them,” McMahon said. CSRIC is hoping to bridge the gap between what the public expects and what is technologically possible right now, and then see what can be done to improve location tracking technology, she said.

The technology used to process wireless 911 calls is not fail-safe or “100 percent accurate,” so the public safety sector needs to know what the technological limits are, said Dorothy Spears-Dean, public safety communications coordinator for the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. There also needs to be additional public education to ensure callers remember to provide accurate location information when they use 911, she said. While schools tell students regularly to provide their location to 911 dispatchers, it’s a lesson that needs to be retaught to adults as well, Spears-Dean said. “In a crisis situation, you would be surprised how many people within a public safety environment can’t remember where they are,” she said.

Determining an indoor location of a wireless 911 caller is more difficult in urban areas than in rural ones, particularly when a caller is in a high-rise building, said Steve Wisely, a senior project coordinator for APCO. If the public safety sector can address those issues in urban areas, the solution will be more readily applied to suburban and rural areas, he said. Determining a caller’s location in a high-rise building depends on determining the caller’s location above sea level, and then using that to determine the floor the caller is on, McMahon said. “If I receive information that you're 350 meters above seas level, I have to be able to figure out: does that mean you're on the 10th floor, or the 12th floor?” she said. Technology will need to change before PSAPs can use sea level as an effective way to determine floor location, McMahon said. Wi-Fi hotspots have shown some promise as a way to determine a caller’s floor in high-rises, but technical challenges remain, Wisely said. Next-Generation 911 technology will also be helpful, as it’s been designed to link up with the floor plans for a building once a street address is determined, Hixson said.

As wireless carriers helped develop the current wireless 911 location technology for outdoor use, the process was just as fraught with challenges as it is now, said Richard Craig, director of engineering and operations support for Verizon Wireless. Verizon Wireless and the other three national carriers -- AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile -- are participating in the tests. “We've had a long road to get here,” he said. GPS technology has been a “major concern” as the carriers have worked on improving indoor 911 location technology, said Jeanna Green, a network development engineer with Sprint Nextel. While the current technology is not great at determining the location of indoor wireless 911 callers, it has improved over time -- and the tests will be an opportunity to improve it even further, she said.