[VoiceOps] Fwd: 911 and Softphones

[Carlos Alvarez]

GPS is useless inside most buildings.  That's why mobiles have A-GPS, which
is assisted by wifi and bluetooth.  Even in homes, GPS signals are mostly
blocked.  In a commercial building, almost guaranteed to be blocked.

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 1:23 PM Aaron C. de Bruyn <aaron at heyaaron.com>
wrote:

> 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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>
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