steve adams

Steve Adams has been on both the equipment and carrier sides of the wireless business, having been a regional network director for PrimeCo PCS and lead operations executive for several vendors. He spoke with Wireless Review Executive Editor Vince Vittore about what lies ahead for wireless 911 and where Intrado is among the dominant players.

On the biggest issue for 2005: We've added significantly to the base of towers that are under management. There's a lot of expense pressure on carriers' minds. 911 is a labor-intensive process and wireless carriers aren't throwing a lot of people at it. The [public-safety answering points] also have to be ready for phase two, and a lot of those PSAPs aren't.

On legislation that will help fund PSAPs' phase two deployment: The passage of the bill by the Senate is good, good and good. It provides grants to update emergency communications services and addresses the prickly issue of states collecting funds and diverting them. It also appears that it's going to facilitate coordination of services through different levels of government.

On mergers' impact on wireless 911: There's really two aspects to every merger — the business facet and the network facet. Very quickly after the DOJ approval [of Cingular and AT&T Wireless], we were engaged with the companies. We've had joint meetings with them so we're already working on the business aspects of this. They've done an extensive amount of planning.

On the impact of Wi-Fi and WiMAX on E911: You have to look at voice over IP on the wireline side as a comparison. VoIP providers have got to deal with 911 and not just with consumer education. I think we're not far away from large press articles where something goes wrong because a customer couldn't use their VoIP phone to call 911. We have solutions in that area where we're providing early-stage 911 for VoIP providers. It's a little too soon to see how all that is going to shake out [on the wireless VoIP side]. When it comes to wide area mobility, it's not trivial to implement. A lot of big companies have spent a lot of time getting these things to work together. If you start adding on pico networks, micronetworks and wide area networks, that's not a trivial thing. We, as an industry, had better make all those layers of the wedding cake work together. The principal is the customer expectation is that it works the same as a landline and wireless phone. Our end targets better have the same thing in mind.