[asterisk-users] E911 Voip Trunking

[Nathan Anderson]

On Friday, April 19, 2013 5:35 PM, Warren Selby wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:41 AM, Chris Nighswonger wrote: 
> 
> > During the course of a conversation with an member of the IT group who
> > handles the E911 center for our county, I learned that all of the
> > county's E911 is voip based. This got me to wondering why we could not
> > just configure up a SIP or some such trunk directly to the E911 center to
> > handle our emergency traffic. The county seems interested in exploring
> > the possibility.
> 
> There are E911 providers that offer this functionality.  I know off the
> top of my head, 911Enable offers a service like this.  A former client of
> mine that provided hosted PBX services had a contract with them.  I'm
> sure there are other providers out there as well.   

Indeed.  911ETC is who we use, and is another example.  Even if you could peer directly with your county's PSAP, in the case of 911, I think it is a way better idea to go with one of these specialty SIP-based E911 providers, for the simple reason that even if you only sell VoIP service to people residing within your county, ATAs and VoIP phones are nomadic in nature: people are going to take them with them when traveling/on vacations, or maybe even use a soft phone with their account.  This means that they are going to need to have the ability to update their physical E911 location, so that when they are away from home or away from the office, their 911 calls are directed to the correct local PSAP for their current location, and not back to their home county's PSAP.

So, sure, you might be able to convince your county PSAP to peer with you directly via SIP, but it's not realistic to then go out and do the same for the other 8,000+ PSAPs in the U.S. (http://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/enhanced911/psapregistry.html) that one of your customers *might* be closest to at any given time, not to mention purchase and maintain the infrastructure, technology, and data needed to accurately geocode a physical address and then map it to a given PSAP.  That's what these services are for: they deal with all of that, and all you have to do is send 911 calls to their SIP proxy, and they route it appropriately.

-- 
Nathan Anderson
First Step Internet, LLC
nathana at fsr.com