The more the telephony services are mingled with Internet, the more they are exposed to both Internet security threats and bungle-ups created when applying the various patches and updates that are made necessarily by the constant stream of security updates. Plain POTS has less of that.
It's true that if you put enough quality and maintenance into a system, it can stay at ~100% uptime. But very few organizations have those kinds of resources, and government systems tend to not be funded more than they need to be, and generally aren't staffed with state of the art tech teams.
But it's not unreasonable to imagine the possibility that this can change in the future, if the cost and risk for maintaining such a system were to decrease below a certain threshold.
I work for a company with about 40 employees. Our offices are connected to two different ISPs: one by optical fiber and one by VDSL. We have two different telephone operators for our outgoing calls from the offices, and I have two mobile phones with different operators.
During the last five years there have been multiple outages that lasted between minutes and days, but most of the times the redundancy have saved us. But when we lost power (the whole city went dark for hours) we went down when the batteries in the UPS was drained. Having our own generators is too expensive.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-int...
Maybe that would increase the number of prank calls, but maybe that's worth the price.
What I was trying to say was that users are only able contact emergency services through POTS (and, by extension, GSM, obviously). The fact that operators and emergency services use Astrid was sort of beside the point. Although I do believe the last major outage was because of Astrid.
I don't understand why regulators can't drop the reliability requirements and understand that if skype, facetime, whatsapp, viber, twitter, etc. all have 99.9% reliability, then the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down.
Just have a #911Emergency official hashtag and have a bunch of people reply to it. That's the way the people want it.
2. > the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down.
That depends crucially on the correlation. If there are common fault modes (such as: internet down), the probability might be way higher. (Remember, it used to be common wisdom that it was possible that one or two home owners won't be able to pay their mortgages, but the probability that many will be unable to pay their mortgages is so low that all these MBS and CDO's can be rated AAA...)
3. EDIT to add: Of course, adding communication options can only increase the probability that you can reach your emergency provider, but there's a reason that Skype etc. used to come with these big disclaimers that they're no replacement for POTS, namely the excellent reliability of POTS.
[1] "Although POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Re...
Until we come up with some universal multi-layered standards which provide at least the same level of uptime and utility, it seems more than a little premature to pull all of it up as a matter of course. Obviously in many places there are space constraints, but that is not usually an issue in arguably the most important use case, at home.
When an emergency happens, what are the chances a POTS phone is nearby? If there isn't a landline within 100 yards of the incident, the POTS network has failed to help.
Now given that, does it really matter if the actual phones have are "3 nines" or "5 nines"?
I can understand Skype and WhatsApp having some kind of official emergency option, but not a hashtag on Twitter.
The true-but-unhelpful answer is "depends on your ISP and what contract you have with them". A typical home user's "last mile" is almost certainly less reliable than POTS, agreed. But if you make it onto the backbone the internet is better at routing around disruption than the circuit-oriented phone system. So I wouldn't want to count on the phone system always being more reliable.
(Home wifi could work, but the usefulness of an island system is limited. Outer link also worked last time, but what good is that when the other end is not even on UPS? Next hop was optical, but who knows how that is powered and whence.)
Having the Dutch government nationalise the 911 service with no compensation to the share holders would be a start.
Is there even 911@police.com? or some type of service that can be reached like that? I'm sure this must have happened a lot in the past.
Seems the most reliable would be to ping a friend over internet so he can call the emergency services
After that you have people you know will be available to come to where you are, email or im
After that you have people you know will answer like your manager, the front desk at work, even filing a support ticket at work, the whole goal being getting the attention of someone who knows you