E-911 Back in the News

GPS World
September 8th, 2010

The Federal Communications Commission's E-911 mandate drove the consumer GPS market - and many believe created LBS - when first proposed more than a decade ago. Depending who you talk to, compliance has been slow, or is happening despite the FCC's decision to tighten geographical area of compliance rules.

"Compliance itself hasn't slowed. What's happened is the FCC's desire to tighten the rules for geographical area of compliance, and also address issues such as indoor location performance and consistency across environments," said Marty Feuerstein, Polaris Wireless' chief technology officer. "In the past, for compliance, carriers could aggregate performance across the entire nation or their whole network. That allowed some systems to work well in urban but not rural, and others to work well in rural but not urban. New rules will likely reduce the compliance geographical area down to county level, which will not allow as much averaging as the old approach."

The new FCC rules will trigger a new round of compliance benchmarks over several years, Feuerstein said. "They will also trigger deployment of new technologies, hybrid systems for indoor location performance for example, that will likely drive consumer LBS beyond today's GPS," he said.

Feuerstein sits on the FCC's Communications, Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) Working Group 4C, which is focused on technical options for E-911 Location Accuracy for current and emerging technologies in different environments. "The group is also looking at current E-911 gaps identified by public safety agencies and how technologies might address those. It was formed as part of the broader CSRIC initiative kicked off by the FCC as an industry advisory council on telecom, media, and public safety issues," he said.

Although there has been wireless carrier E-911 pushback in the past, including fines for missing deadlines, Feuerstein insists that carriers are not fighting compliance. "They have, however, pushed back on new, tighter accuracy rules. They want to be sure the rules are fair to operators starting from different legacy systems," he said. "They also want the FCC to take into account the differences between national carriers compared to the smaller regional and rural carriers."

Some carriers have expressed support for new rules proposals or aspects of them on the FCC record. Several have voluntarily agreed to adhere to tighter proposals as part of industry mergers and acquisitions."

Feuerstein believes that the big E-911 buzz is about emerging hybrid systems that blend today's handset-based GPS and high accuracy network-based technologies to drive location performance indoors, where satellite systems don't work well, and where the majority of wireless calls are made.

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