How To Fix 911

The emergency network was designed for landlines. Land-what? Why our safety depends on modernizing 911 for the mobile age

By Christine Kenneally Sunday, Apr. 17, 2011
    • Floto+Warner for TIME

    The multimillion-dollar 911 call center a the Hamilton County, Indiana, sheriff's office has 24 state-of-the-art, computer-aided dispatch systems. Each operator sits in a plumped-up chair at an ergonomically designed desk on which five large screens simultaneously show call status, caller information, police radio activity and other date — all of which can be shared instantly over radio, phone, Internet, dispatch and cellular systems.

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    In 2009, 25% of households used only a cell phone, according to government data, a trend that shows no signs of easing. But even as mobile-phone use rockets, it may be rivaled by that of the increasingly popular and cheaper Internet phone. Since the early 2000s, when VOIP phone services were commercialized, more than 21 million Americans have signed up. The problem for 911 is that Internet caller location is less reliable than cell-phone location. It is possible to locate an Internet phone, but service providers aren't obliged by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to add this feature, so they don't. Instead, they ask users to register their address, which is used to route 911 calls. But, like Michaels' caller, people often forget to change their address when they move.

    Because so many phones are mobile, dispatchers now end up manually rerouting more calls between centers. And therein lies what is probably the most widely shared misconception about 911: that it is somehow networked. But "911" is a convention, not a system. More than 6,000 call centers in the U.S. are run independently by the relevant counties, cities and states. Each may serve a particular area or population — like California's highway patrol or a campus or airport — and their jurisdictions may or may not overlap. What's more, in most cases, if a call center is itself hit by an emergency like a hurricane, it doesn't have automatic backup. The phone just won't ring.

    Now, led by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), the FCC and various emergency-industry vendors, dramatic plans are under way to fix 911 by ripping out its underlying architecture. According to industry insiders like Nate Wilcox, chief technology officer of the 911 software supplier MicroData, the new 911 will roll out across the country over the next two to five years. At least 100 call centers are already testing various features. The new 911 will be an entirely new creature: an intelligent network of networks that will not just find you faster but also read your texts and watch your video at the same time that it may track threats to the entire nation.

    The Next-Generation 911

    If you absolutely had to call 911, you'd be well placed to do it in Hamilton County, Indiana, where the sheriff's buildings in Noblesville recently underwent a multimillion-dollar upgrade.

    In the new call center (which boasts a noiseless vacuum cleaner because there is no good time to pull out the vacuum on the other end of 911), operators sit at one of 24 state-of-the-art, computer-aided dispatch systems. Each has five large screens showing call status, caller information, police-radio activity and other information. Here the old 911 system has been upgraded to an interconnected Internet protocol (IP) base. "Physical distances no longer are an issue," explains Jeremy Hunt, the Hamilton County sheriff's network administrator. "We can [give] a dispatcher across the county the same capabilities as a dispatcher in our building."

    Not only does it connect all of its internal moving parts, but this new 911 also shares its network with local emergency services and with other call centers, creating a vast but nimble emergency network. That means the new 911 can respond to, or help prevent, problems on a national scale. Dispatchers could be the first line of information gathering in the event of a pandemic, for instance, or 911 data could be filtered to detect signs of terrorist activity.

    This overhaul of the architecture also means that at any level, from caller to call center to emergency services, all data can be shared. Take maps: in Hamilton County, Brooke Gajownik's crucial duty is to "geocode" all information that comes in or goes out through 911 — information that is constantly added to layers of maps on which dispatchers rely. So when a cell-phone call is received, emergency dispatchers first consult a standard street map. Then they look at additional digital map layers, such as those that give second looks at a location, like an oblique aerial shot, or show local landmarks that callers might recognize. They can also look at the names of residents mapped on a street. When a recent cell-phone call came in from a frightened babysitter who didn't know where she was, the dispatcher found her street location based on her longitude and latitude. She then ran through a map that showed household names: "Are you at the A. Jones house? Are you at the B. Smith house?" until the girl said, "That's it!"

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