9-1-1 Leaders & Wireless Carriers Answer the Call to Improve 9-1-1 Indoor Location Accuracy

On November 14, NENA, APCO, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless announced a consensus plan to meet the FCC’s challenge to improve 9-1-1 indoor location accuracy. The industry has long relied on the public safety expertise at NENA and APCO to find solutions to location accuracy challenges. This agreement builds on that long-term partnership and recognizes that improved indoor location accuracy can be achieved through readily available indoor location technologies, which will provide field responders with the information they want and need: a dispatchable location. The proposed solution harnesses the availability of Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® technologies that are already deployed and expected to expand significantly in the near term.

Since 1996, the FCC required a wireless 9-1-1 call to include location information based on outdoor technologies. Increasingly, wireless 9-1-1 calls moved indoors creating challenges for outdoor-based solutions. The FCC called on the wireless industry and public safety community to develop a consensus approach to this important 9-1-1 issue. Through these aggressive and measureable location accuracy commitments based on actual 9-1-1 calls, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, working with public safety partners NENA and APCO, have answered the call.

The solution involves an agreed upon timeline to:

Verify technologies and vendor performance for indoor and outdoor technologies in a test bed;
Accelerate the delivery of dispatchable location using indoor technologies with ambitious milestones for demonstration, standards development, and implementation of database and handset capabilities; and
Improves existing location technologies for better outdoor and indoor location fixes.

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National Emergency Number Association