Blang!

According to this Globe and Mail story, the CRTC is going to order the telcoms to finally fix the cellular 911 network.

Unfortunately this exposes just what a sad joke the CRTC has become. They have known about this problem for years and they were warned that there would be deaths if something wasn’t done. It was obvious.

Result? Deaths. There have been at least three recent incidents where location determination of cell callers could have saved lives.

But the CRTC allowed the PSAPs and the ILECs to waste more than two years on a non-solution for VOIP location determination while doing nothing about wireless. And now that people are actually dieing the CRTC finally decides it should do something. What a joke. The people at the CRTC that have allowed this to transpire should loose their jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, VOIP location determination is needed but it pales in importance to wireless. More than 50% of calls to 911 come from cell phones while VOIP calls are less than 1% (it’s actually so small no statistics are kept). Furthermore, there are “off-the-shelf” solutions for wireless location determination. Nothing like that exists for VOIP. And let us not forget that the cell companies have been charging “911 access” fees which they just pocket instead of actually using them to implement proper 911 systems.