Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

This is why some states have chosen to go with a single PSAP for the whole state - Cellular E911 has a couple problems, one - the geolocation features of cell phones is best effort, and if it fails, the best the company can do is guess from which site/sector the call is coming in on to route them to the correct PSAP. Two - the cellular networks on whole are best effort, cellular as a technology cannot be as reliable as a wireline hookup, period.

In the future, I believe the move to VoLTE will make E911 more reliable, as it will enable more location data to be sent from the handset at the time of call, but until then, the most reliable way to get geolocation data to a PSAP is to use a landline, period, the landline telephone, is and will remain more reliable, consistent and predictable than any of the technologies replacing it.

As far as why the carrier couldnt be reached? likely calling the wrong place - Sprint FWIW is and has been in the midst of a forklift network upgrade for a couple years now, its just wrapping up now, but parts of the network have been partially non-functional for hours or days at a time - I know however that regular e911 drive testing is a part of test and turnup, and the planned maintenance process for Sprint.

The UK has (essentially) one PSAP for the whole country (it's not actually — there's a number spread across the country for reasons of redundancy, but call allocations are done across the whole network).

It has a few interesting results — most notably, when giving a location, they likely know nothing about it. If you say you're in "Central Park, Fakesville", and it's a small park where you can see the whole thing from the entrance, they will still ask you where about in the park you are — because they don't know. People in high-stress situations can end up wasting time trying to describe in gratuitous detail where they are, instead of just giving an answer like, "it's small; they'll see".

I'm surprised that the situation wasn't handled better by the phones, though. At least here, if a mobile can contact any tower (regardless of network), an emergency call can be placed through it without charge. I suppose if the emergency line is already stagnated, trying again on a different network would just make it worse. Hmm…

A month or two ago I had to call 999 to report a fire on my road. I gave the names of my road and neighbourhood and the operator asked which town or city I was in.

This threw me a little as I live in what is, arguably, the UK's second city (Manchester) and assumed that the system would have at least identified that much from the cell tower.

Still, the fire brigade responded within 5-10 minutes of me placing the call and had the blaze under control little more than 10 minutes after that so I guess the system works.

They almost certainly had it on the screen in front of them. They typically ask for full details anyway, primarily to confirm. City often gets asked separately to make sure the report gets to the right place.

I don't think it really matters if people describe the place in too much detail; the ambulance/whatever is already heading for the central park and the extra directions are just relayed to them on the way.

If the caller needs to be giving instructions as to care for the injured person, it can delay it. There are genuine reasons why you want the dispatching section of the call over ASAP.

FWIW, the landline tends to work because of the amount of manual processes that go into setting up the line in the first place.

Well, depends on what you mean by manual - most landline phones now can be hooked up without even a frame man having to run jumpers, or for that matter a field service visit, customer enters the provisioning information (service address, billing information, puts a credit card in) and the service is turned up.

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