VoIP E911 by committee

The FCC has been stern with voice-over-IP providers about meeting E911 requirements, but it has been more flexible with vendors, allowing them to come up with the best solutions. It is becoming increasingly clear that there will be no single fix for what ails VoIP E911, particularly the nomadic symptom.

Nomadic users are those VoIP users who take their devices with them and plug into the network just about anywhere, thus losing their location information for that day when they have to call for emergency services. Partnerships are forming left in an effort to find the best solution — or the best five solutions — to this challenge.

Companies such as Intrado and TeleCommunications Systems have formed partnerships with a variety of location-based solutions companies, some of which are new.

Intrado, for example, recently announced partnerships with three start-up companies with very different approaches to location. Rosum uses unmodified broadcast TV signals to locate the position of mobile assets, particularly in urban settings and inside buildings. S5 Wireless has developed a chip that can be attached or embedded in consumer, industrial, military or communications devices and can transmit critical location and telemetry information. Skyhook Wireless has developed a metro-area positioning system that leverages Wi-Fi.

These companies will be demonstrating their location solutions along with Intrado at the VON Conference in San Jose, Calif., next week.

“The goal is to demonstrate to the world that this can be done and to show what the future might look like,” said Ken Ameson, vice president of business development for S5 Wireless.

S5's chip is a 5×5 millimeter device that can cost less than $100 now. It determines location with accuracy up to 30 meters, the same as GPS. However, it can accomplish this both indoors and out. The company will reveal its coverage and other particulars in the coming weeks.

“It's not GPS, and that's one of its strengths,” Ameson said. “For companies like Vonage, most of their business is indoors, so any location solution has to work there, and because it is a consumer application, it has to be very inexpensive.”

The strategy behind these partnerships is to cover all the bases. “They will all have to work,” said Robin Erkkila, senior product marketing manager for Intrado. “It's not like wireless E911 where just one technology solves the problem. We have to interface to a lot of different technologies to locate 100% of the users 100% of the time.”

While Intrado is experimenting various solutions and partnering with enterprise-focused companies such as RedSky Technologies, TCS has been working in the geographic information services domain with companies such as Rand McNally.

TCS founder and CEO, Maurice Tose, said during his company's year-end earnings call last month that the company expects to announce additional partnerships over the next 90 days, including several with location-based applications.

The company also recently acquired Oakland, Calif.-based Kivera, which will help tie TCS location information to mapping applications and eventually improve E911 capabilities.

“In addition to enhancing our commercial location-based bundles, the integration of these resources into our carrier business has enabled us to improve the platform that drives our public-safety offerings,” Tose said.

Although these new location companies are spending a lot of time and investment on VoIP E911, they don't see it as the big prize.

“There are a lot of applications possible if you knew the location of the user,” Ameson said. “We want to enable those types of applications.”

COVERING ALL THE BASES

Intrado and partners will demonstrate the latest in VoIP E911 technology next week at the VON Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Partner	Location	Incorporated	Location solution
Rosum	Mountain View, Calif.	2000	Unmodified TV signals
S5 Wireless	Draper, Utah	2003	5 mm chip implants with base station detectors
Skyhook Wireless	Boston	2003	Metro area positioning using Wi-Fi