
On March 30, 2006, Vonage announced 1 million subscribers served with E911 service! Personally, I'm thrilled to hear the news. As someone who spent the worst year of his professional life tied to a customer service desk at Qwest, I'm all in favor of VoIP and P2P alternatives to landline services.
Now, Vonage, when do you think you can successfully deliver that adapter you were supposed to send me a few months ago???






This post also has direct relationship to an earlier regarding US National Grid (USNG).
In addition to street addresses, what geocoordinates will E911 adopt/use, no matter cell phone, VoIP, other source calls, for everyday incidents or larger disaster response where often times responders are not familiar with local street networks/placenames and/or street infrastructure is removed by the winds...?
Consider that very few fire departments use any of the three versions of latitude and longitude (in 2001, 4% divided by three versions = 1.3%). Lat/long simply is not very suitable for on-the-ground work. In fact, fire departments use their own local system neither compatiable/interoperable with other responders from outside their local area.
The first ever US Fire Service Needs Assessment (USFA/NFPA 12/2002) reported that "The vast majority of (fire) departments with a map coordinate system have only a local system, which means the system they have is unlikely to be usable with global positioning systems (GPS) or familiar to, or easily used by, non-local emergency response partners, such as Urban Search and Rescue Teams, the National Guard, and state or national response forces. Moreover, interoperability of spatial-based information systems, equipment, and procedures will likely be rendered impossible beyond the local community under these circumstances. This reliance almost exclusively on local systems exists across-the-board, in all sizes of communities." (http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/fa-240.pdf)
Would it not be a good idea for all E911, and first responder location-based equipment/protocols/doctrine/plans/training AND their dispatch centers Nationwide... to use the same geoaddressing standard (USNG) in addition to street addresses?
It's working for our military professionals in urban and rural areas in Iraq and Afghanistan (and worked for those same military professionals in New Orleans and Pakistan for Hurricane/EQ relief efforts!) ;-)
It's worked for years in Great Britain’s (yes, for years they’ve had a National Grid as well several other European nations....)!
Posted by: Bruce Black | April 3, 2006 4:05 PM | Permalink to Comment