The wireless industry has been lobbying for just the opposite, seeking an extension of the Oct. 1 deadline for Phase II E-911 mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Requests for special waivers have been made by 28 wireless carriers, which have cited the high cost of implementation, the claimed inadequacies of available locator technologies and the failure of public safety agencies to upgrade their facilities to handle the location information.

But with the horrific events of this week having laid bare the limitations of current technology, in some quarters the drive to deploy enhanced services has itself taken on the air of an emergency response.

Current technology can only trace a call to within a cell site, which could range from a half-mile to a 15-mile radius. Topography is also a problem, since terrain is a potential source of radio propagation anomalies. For example, an emergency wireless phone call made from the World Trade Center rubble this week might first have been received in Pennsylvania before being routed back to New York.

"Such tragedies bring out the necessity of making more precise location information available to offer timely relief efforts," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing at SiRF Technology Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

Location technology can be deployed in one of two ways. The first uses intelligence in the network to communicate with cell sites to determine the subscriber's location. The second places a chip in each handset, using the same global positioning system (GPS) that has tracked ships and vehicles for years.

Thus far there's a lack of consensus among carriers on which way to proceed, and the FCC has provided no definitive direction.

Under Phase I of the system, the FCC had required wireless carriers to be able to transmit call-back information to public safety answering points (PSAPs) starting in April 1999. While most carriers are said to have put that technology in place, PSAPs in many areas have not been upgraded to handle such data. Rather than mandate a hard deadline for the Phase I implementation in the network infrastructure, the FCC and the wireless industry are moving forward with the Phase II rollout.

Straight to the source

Phase II automatic location identification (ALI) mandates that service providers transmit far more accurate and reliable location information to emergency personnel to enable the source of a wireless 911 call to be located with pinpoint accuracy.

Under the current Phase II deployment schedule, by Dec. 31, at least 25 percent of all new handsets activated are required to be ALI-capable.By Dec. 31, 2002, 100 percent of all new digital handsets must be ALI-capable. The FCC is expected to announce its decision soon on the carriers' waiver requests. While some in the industry expect the FCC to approve the requests, some observers claim the wireless industry is dragging its feet.

Indeed, only days before the terrorist attack, California Rep. Anna Eshoo called for the industry to step up its deployment efforts. "Approximately 140,000 emergency wireless calls are made every day on the expectation that [the emergency call] could be the single most important call the subscriber will ever make," Eshoo said at a press conference. "Yet in far too many cases, subscribers cannot be located, because E-911 technology has not yet been fully deployed. With so much at stake, we cannot afford to delay any further."

Eshoo noted that the FCC developed its E-911 regulations in 1996. "The nation's wireless carriers have had more than five years to comply," she said. "Further delay could mean the difference between life and death."

Ironically, on the same day the attacks occurred, the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), a non-profit educational organization pushing E-911 technology, issued its first report card on U.S. 911 services. NENA gave the service a B grade and called 911's future "threatened," largely because of what it called the nation's incomplete support infrastructure for wireless 911 calls.

According to NENA, of the 190 million calls made across the nation to 911 in 1999, 50 million were placed from wireless phones, a tenfold increase from 10 years ago. In the next five years, NENA expects the number of wireless 911 calls to more than double.

The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) this week pledged to work with the public safety community to make location technology a reality for wireless 911 emergency calls. "This is a team effort," Tom Wheeler, president and chief executive of CTIA, said in a statement. "But there needs to be an equivalent commitment on the part of public safety agencies to upgrade their facilities to handle this information.

"It is difficult work. No other nation in the world has successfully developed the technology to pinpoint a caller's location from a wireless device," Wheeler said.

Will they or won't they?

If FCC officials indeed extend the deployment deadline, they will be doing so for the second time. The original deployment date for Phase II was Sept. 8, 2000.

An FCC spokeswoman said Thursday (Sept. 13) that the requests are "pending [and are] under active review. I couldn't speculate exactly when the commission would be acting upon them, although obviously we hope to address them by Oct. 1."

Some worry that wireless operators may respond to public pressure for accelerated E-911 deployment by forging a patchwork solution. "We are concerned about what might happen if service providers compromise on their decision by implementing a technology solution that offers less accuracy," said Ashu Pande, director of wireless strategic marketing at SiRF.

According to the Phase II location accuracy and reliability rules set by the FCC, handset-based products are required to locate a caller within 50 meters for 67 percent of all emergency calls and 150 meters for 95 percent of such calls. For network-based products, wireless carriers must locate a caller within 100 meters for 67 percent of all calls and within 300 meters for 95 percent of all calls.

But "300 meters is not a small radius — especially in a city — for location information. It doesn't help law enforcement people," said SiRF's Pande.

SiRF, a fabless chip company specializing in GPS technology, advocates a handset-based solution. "Multiple designs are going on with our GPS chip set right now," said SiRF's Chadha. "We expect significant shipment next year, within six to nine months after the Oct. 1 deadline."

SnapTrack Inc. (Campbell, Calif.), a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc., has pursued a hybrid approach that it says will appear in a product that will meet the Oct. 1 deadline. Employing both GPS satellite and network infrastructure information and enhancing an original Qualcomm design, SnapTrack's gpsOne technology promises high-availability positioning capability in all terrain. A SnapTrack spokesman said Sprint PCS will deploy Phase II by the Oct. 1 deadline via a gpsOne-enabled handset.

But while Qualcomm's gps-One chip set, the MSM3300, has been commercially available since December for CDMA handsets, a solution for non-CDMA platforms is not yet available. Qualcomm promises support for other air interfaces, such as GSM and wideband CDMA, starting late in 2002.

Further, Qualcomm's purchase of SnapTrack appears to have wrought confusion among handset vendors. Motorola and Texas Instruments both licensed SnapTrack's first-generation DSP-based solution more than two years ago. But "Motorola, together with other handset manufacturers and chip set makers, quickly concluded that the solution was not a good architecture for wireless handsets and needed to be improved and modified for commercial volume products," according to comments filed with the FCC last fall by Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson. "As this process began to modify the existing SnapTrack product, SnapTrack was purchased by Qualcomm, delaying necessary changes to the solution. . . . This has added more time to the development process."

Meanwhile, SiRF's Pande acknowledged that although the company announced its GPS chip set two years go, SiRF's engineers have been busy improving the accuracy and availability of its GPS capability since then. But Pande said handset vendors have blamed the lack of volume equipment commitments from wireless carriers, rather than a lack of adequate support technologies, for the slow pickup of orders for GPS chip sets.