Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Next Generation 911

Yesterday the Diane Rhem Show had a piece on the 9-1-1 emergency phone system which itself was motivated by the recent NYT opinion column written by the chairman of the FCC. The basic point in both stories was that our 9-1-1 system is horribly out of date, and it will take a lot of effort and money to get it up to speed.

I have known for a while that cellphones were sort of a problem for 9-1-1 since it is hard to track the location the call is coming from. I had also heard that some areas are upgrading to accept text messages, though it was not until the story yesterday that I learned at least one reason that would be desirable (to silently notify police of an intruder). The thing that I had not considered before is all the benefits we could have if 9-1-1 were fully modernized including pictures and video (send a picture of the intruder, have a paramedic be able to see the injury, probably countless other things).

One of the guests on the Diane Rhem show commented that he expects the number itself to be about the only thing that is still the same five years from now. According to David Furth from the FCC, the US system is still pretty good on a global scale, but we have a lot of work to do if we want the system to perform in the best way possible.

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