ORLANDO, Fla.-“I feel like I’m on a bucking bronco and about to get thrown into the mud,” George Shaginaw Jr. said at the Wireless Location Applications Conference earlier this month.
“We are looking at nine wireless licensees in each market by October 2001, and we need a seamless network, a national policy and the cooperation of partnership groups,” said Shaginaw, senior vice president for operations and technology of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
CTIA co-sponsored the conference with Bellcore and the National Emergency Numbering Association to assess the issues surrounding implementing location technology for emergency assistance and value-added commercial services to wireless communications end-users.
“About 25 (percent) to 30 percent of the attendees here are carriers, and [the rest] are vendors. Why? Because in a competitive environment, carriers are concerned about losing control of technology,” Shaginaw said.
“How does this conflict with (the need for) interoperability among carriers with different technologies? Does the requirement for backward compatibility for all outstanding phones mean we must go with network-based solutions? If so, what then about access (in handsets) to [Global Positioning System services]?”
In the country’s largest wireless market, California, tensions are mounting between telecommunications carriers and companies offering location technologies, said Stephen E. Carlson, executive director of the Cellular Carriers Association of California.
“What’s become a real problem is that some of the solution providers have tried to get between the carriers and the public-safety agencies for permitting things that are contrary to existing law. This is a conflict of interest,” he said.
Public-safety agencies have an important and legitimate stake in wireless-location technology issues, said Bob Miller, technical issues director for NENA.
“The choice of how technology gets to us is important. Equally important is how a call comes into our network,” he said.
John R. Melcher, director of information systems for the Greater Harris County 911 Emergency Network in the Houston area, said that public-safety agencies have the right to a role in technology choices because they are “paying for the initial rollout of Phase II.”
The second phase of the Federal Communications Commission mandate requires wireless carriers to locate 911 calls within a radius of 125 meters 67 percent of the time by October 2001. At the same time, wireless carriers don’t enjoy the liability exclusions available to wireline telecommunications companies for calls that are not located, said Thomas E. Wheeler, CTIA president and chief executive officer.
“Carriers have been sued for failure of E911 calls in dead zones … There are difficulties getting new (cell) sites approved and as leases (on existing cell sites) run out, municipalities are imposing new conditions (for siting),” CCAC’s Carlson said.
Consider the dead zones in Florida, where 80 percent of the population lives near the coasts, said Bob Nibarger, a NENA member who is a public-safety officer in Sarasota County, Fla. Furthermore, it is a frequent occurrence that police in Florida cities, such as Jacksonville, end up having distress calls routed to them erroneously from as far away as New Jersey, he said.
“The (three) unresolved policy issues are limited liability, FCC regulatory clarification about technology choices and regulatory guidance about the compliance of handset-based technologies,” said Lori Buerger, director of external affairs for AT&T Wireless Services Inc.
“We like the [Non Call Path Signaling Solution] because it provides for a robust evolution to Phase II, whether that is handset- or network-based.”
Bill Rains, director of regulatory affairs for Powertel Inc., said standardization at either the federal or state level is necessary in order to avoid “all those roadblocks at the local level.”
Because of variations in different parts of its footprint, Powertel will look to “more than one third-party vendor for solutions,” he added.
Terry Rayburn, product manager for location services for Sprint Spectrum L.P., and Bob Ewald, director of location services for Nextel Communications Inc., said any system they deploy must allow them to retain control of the location database. They also said the carriers will rely on an open interface so that, in Rayburn’s words, “multiple technologies can be unified by the network intelligence.”
Calling it “extremely valuable information,” Ewald said Nextel wants to offer this location database as “an open interface” to give developers of location-based value-added services a chance to “demonstrate commercial viability to (our) management.”
In the rapidly evolving field of wireless location, Sprint PCS began with the approach that “E911 and value-added services (based on location technologies) are similar, but they are two different things,” Rayburn said.
