9-1-1 Simple to imagine, crazily complex.

 The CRTC reviewed 9-1-1 service in Canada and revealed a complex high value service we scarcely understand.  And we want it to work right every time, right now, no matter what our emergency is.

Some examples from the link:

.Our call goes through a tangle of federal, provincial, municipal and corporate parties and policies and does so differently in different places.  Yet somehow our plea has to be bundled up, identified and responded to locally, accurately and promptly.   Nothing else governmental is this organized and operating in real time.

.9-1-1 manages to work thanks to the best efforts and goodwill of the actors.  To quote then commissioner Timothy Denton, "Today, the 9-1-1 system is working because first responders, PSAPs and telecommunications service providers make it work, not because the technology is flawless or its governance system adequate."

.NG-9-1-1- is "next generation" 9-1-1 and will allow text, information pages and video to be exchanged.

.Reverse 9-1-1 is the ability of your town or province to send emergency alerts in the other direction and this is becoming widespread.   You can't automatically run a branching emergency system in reverse but the bugs are being worked out.

.9-1-1 when it gives accurate longitude and latitude information doesn't give height.  Are you in a parking garage or on the fifth floor of an apartment building?

.The biggest critical shortcoming is accurate location information.  Thanks to VOIP, many calls to 9-1-1 have fuzzy auto-location, sometimes with several blocks radius of uncertainty.  Below is Section 212 reporting on location accuracy testing.  The tiny inner circle is 100m accuracy.  The very pale blue circle is 300m accuracy.  The yellow circle is 1000m accuracy. The dots are the location results, coloured for three different phone services.   (See also sections 214 and 215 showing an example where almost one call in six was only known to the 1000m accuracy standard.)

212. As part of this process, TruePosition submitted a presentation regarding a testing initiative that they undertook in the Canadian marketplace to better understand the quality of information being received by PSAPs with respect to location accuracy in different Canadian cities. Roughly speaking, the methodology involved placing calls to selected PSAPs from outdoor and indoor locations, and using three different mobile providers in each region to validate data. Below is an illustration of the results from placing test calls from an indoor location in Fredericton. The different-coloured dots indicate the different carriers, and the three circles represent a 100-metre, 300-metre and 1,000-metre radius from the actual call location.