[VoiceOps] Fwd: 911 and Softphones

[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

I'm still wondering why desk phones don't have a small built-in GPS chip
yet?  Soft phones on cell phones could have access to GPS.  Web browsers
wouldn't work so well.
But having the phone out-of-band-signal the phone server with GPS info
(maybe a SIP header or something) would allow the phone server to use that
information for routing 911 calls.
It could even pass the info through directly to more 'advanced' 911 centers.

One possibility would be to go old-style and transmit the data in-band over
the voice circuit similar to modems or DSL.  We're only talking a few bytes
for GPS coordinates, elevation, and accuracy information.  Burst the data
at the beginning of the call, or every 30 seconds, etc...

My motorola HT-1250 from two decades ago would transmit something like an
8-character radio identifier when you keyed up.  It only delayed the
conversation by a third of a second.

Maybe the phone server could even add in some additional information (i.e.
"123 West Main St / 3rd Floor / Room 42").

-A

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:53 PM Carlos Alvarez <caalvarez at gmail.com> wrote:

> I *thought* I had read something about mobile apps being given a pass on
> 911, but not completely sure.  And then where do we cross the line?  Mobile
> app, tablet running a WebRTC softphone...etc...
>
>
> On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:41 PM Mike Hammett <voiceops at ics-il.net> wrote:
>
>> We're looking that we may have to allocate a lot more DIDs, simply for
>> the new 911 requirements. We have a lot of clients with work from home
>> people. Some have their own DIDs already, some don't.
>>
>> Softphones make this a lot more complicated. We could have the same
>> extension connected via desk phone, windows app, Chrome extension, phone
>> app, and tablet app. The desk phone is pretty easy. The mobile app? Yeah,
>> that's inherently much more difficult to manage.
>>
>>
>> I don't know.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Mike Hammett
>> Intelligent Computing Solutions
>> http://www.ics-il.com
>>
>>
>>
>> Midwest Internet Exchange
>> http://www.midwest-ix.com
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: *"Mike Hammett" <voiceops at ics-il.net>
>> *To: *"Voiceops.org" <voiceops at voiceops.org>
>> *Sent: *Thursday, May 14, 2020 2:04:43 PM
>> *Subject: *[VoiceOps] Fwd: 911 and Softphones
>>
>> The pitfalls of having my email address mirror the mailing lists I'm on,
>> I get list submissions.  :-)
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Mike Hammett
>> Intelligent Computing Solutions
>> http://www.ics-il.com
>>
>>
>>
>> Midwest Internet Exchange
>> http://www.midwest-ix.com
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: *"Christopher Aloi" <ctaloi at gmail.com>
>> *To: *voiceops at ics-il.net
>> *Sent: *Thursday, May 14, 2020 9:39:41 AM
>> *Subject: *911 and Softphones
>>
>> Hey All,
>>
>> With the recent migration to everyone working from home we are seeing a
>> huge increase in soft phone usage.  How is everyone handling location
>> updates for 911 with soft phones?  Our switch has the concept of sites and
>> users fall within a site but can also travel across sites.  An out pulsed
>> number is bound to the site when 911 is dialed from within the site.  We
>> are looking at building individual sites for each user so they can have a
>> dedicated unique outbound number only for 911.  Does your company consider
>> a soft phone the same as a "hard" phone with regards to 911?  From the
>> reading I have done I see no delineation between the two.  Thanks,  Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>
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