New FCC rules aim to route 911 calls more accurately

When 31-year-old Shanell Anderson dialed 911 from her sinking SUV, it took dispatchers 20 minutes to locate her in a retention pond that straddled two Georgia county lines. By then, it was too late.

New Federal Communications Commission rules aim to eliminate this sort of emergency-response confusion that wastes precious minutes and ultimately costs lives.

Under the rules, adopted Jan. 25, mobile carriers are tasked with using a caller’s exact location as the reference point for dispatching the closest emergency services, not the nearest cell tower that picks up the call.

By implementing so-called location-based routing, a call can more quickly reach the correct public safety answering point. The issue affects up to 23 million misrouted wireless calls each year, according to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

She said she witnessed the problem firsthand when she visited a 911 call center in Little Rock, Arkansas. A staff member demonstrated how a test call placed from a cell phone inside the center first pinged a tower across town, and would result in that call being answered by a different public safety answering point on the other side of the Arkansas River.

“This slows emergency response because it requires transferring the call to get to the right public safety officials who can send the right response,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “Some of our largest carriers have already started using location-based routing technology in their networks. So we know it works. Now we look forward to having it work everywhere.”

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have already rolled out or plan to deploy location-based routing on some level, demonstrating that the technology has developed enough over the last several years and is feasible to implement industrywide, according to the FCC.

Making the switch to location-based routing will go a long way toward patching a loophole that’s made now-ubiquitous technology more dangerous for its users in some instances, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said in a statement.

“While our wireless networks, on the whole, have made it much easier to get help when and where we need it, many of them continue to use unreliable tower-based routing,” he said. “The good news is that new technologies have also given us much better ways of determining a caller’s location than simply assuming they’re located at the cell tower handling the call.”