Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

You have probably seen, or will shortly see, the news about how a Canadian toddler died because the family’s 911 call, placed via a VoIP service, never reached the local 911 dispatch center. As sure as I am that I breathe air, I’m just about as sure that some some phone company PR bastard will try to spin this as though it was an inherent fault of VoIP that caused the child’s death (and will maker sure that news media around North America gets that version of the story).

The facts, however, shed a bit more light on the subject. As the Toronto Globe and Mail reports:

Comwave is still trying to sort out that night’s events. The Luck family’s call was routed to a third-party call centre in Concord, Ont. Comwave had 10 staff members handling 911 calls across Canada.

According to Mr. Barzakay, the network automatically reconnected the call after the initial failed attempt to contact 911. He couldn’t yet say how many rings went unanswered.

The worker at the call centre had a hard time understanding the caller because of a language barrier, Mr. Barzakay said, and relied on the Mississauga address on file and dispatched an ambulance there. He added that customers are encouraged to stay on the phone, but in this case, the caller hung up.

“There was indeed difficulty,” Mr. Barzakay said. “Whether it was from hysterics on the call, I’m not sure.”

But he acknowledged that the family wasn’t to blame. “Clearly, the customer is entitled to receive 911 the moment they press 911.”

The above paragraphs are buried way down in the article, and I just wanted to call your attention to them.  Comwave, the VoIP company involved, is clearly not trying to shirk any responsibility they may have had, but as any 911 operator can tell you, in a panic situation callers sometimes do dumb things, like hanging up in the middle of the call.  And no 911 operator can be expected to understand every caller with a thick accent, or who is speaking in another language. After all, people who are fluent in many languages generally command a much higher salary than what we pay 911 operators.

There have been cases where traditional telephone companies have routed 911 calls to the wrong call center.  We reported a few years ago (on the old MI-Telecom mailing list) of a case where a Wisconsin man died of a heart attack when his 911 call was misrouted – and that call went entirely over the PSTN.  Two years ago, the mother of a 5-year-old boy died when a Detroit 911 operator thought the child was playing with the phone, and wouldn’t take the call seriously, and that was a PSTN call also.

Much of the problem that VoIP companies have had with VoIP calls is that the phone companies aren’t exactly trying to make it easy for VoIP companies to make the connections.  I know someone that works at a company that does VoIP, and he has told me that if they pass a VoIP call onto their upsteam carrier and it’s from a number that’s not in some database, they have to pay some astronomical sum ($20 or $25, if I recall correctly) for that one single call, even if it was just a misdialed call.  I don’t really understand why this is the case, but it apparently is.

Many years ago, the various regulatory agencies decided that it was important for telephone companies to pass the Caller ID number to each other as part of the call setup, without charging the company that receives the data (alas, such was not the case for Caller ID name information, which is why you often get calls showing something generic like “cell phone”, or a city and state, instead of the caller’s name). If they have the power to say that certain information must be passed without regard for compensation, shouldn’t that also be true of emergency calls?

The death of a child is always tragic.  But if there is any good to come from it, it might be that the CRTC and the FCC will order phone companies to pass 911 calls through to the correct 911 center expeditiously, and without charge.  We would think that in an emergency, concerns over who pays for a call should be a secondary consideration, yet no small VoIP company can afford to pay ridiculously high charges to pass 911 calls through to a company that can handle them (usually the incumbent local telephone company).

The thing you have to keep in mind is that 911 center operators – usually municipalities or counties – buy their 911 service (and often their equipment) from the telephone company, for the same reason that 20 years ago most businesses bought computers from IBM – it’s a “safe” purchase decision.  If the equipment doesn’t work, if the service has problems, you can blame the telephone company, but not the employee that made the decision to use the phone company’s services. The problem is that the phone companies can then control how calls access the 911 center, and they are not above making it difficult or expensive for VoIP companies to provide high quality 911 service.  That needs to change – 911 access must be “carrier agnostic” and even, insofar as is possible, “technology agnostic.”  The phone companies must not be allowed to set up barriers to the completion of 911 calls from alternative technology services, just because they can, and because it might put more money in their accounts.

I’m aware that part of the problem is number and device portability.  Nowadays you cannot look at the area code and first three digits of a phone number and determine the location of a caller – they might be using a cell phone, or a VoIP adapter plugged in somewhere other than the usual location.  It’s pretty certain that devices are only going to get more portable as time progresses, and we need a way to pass real-time location information along with 911 calls. The idea of associating a particular number with a fixed location is just plain nonsense that is costing lives.  I don’t have any “quick fix” for this, but acting as though we are still living in the 1950’s, when every phone number terminated at a fixed and specific location, is surely not the answer!

But there is one final point to keep in mind. Sometimes, bad things just happen. Children are killed because something goes wrong every year. Children choke on defective toys, but we don’t blame all toys.  Children drown, but we don’t try to ban swimming pools or say that children are not allowed to swim in a lake. Some children are even tragically killed by parents or caretakers in fits of anger, but we certainly don’t blame all parents or make it illegal to hire babysitters. Likewise, it would be totally irresponsible and repugnant for a telephone company to use this child’s death for some anti-VoIP propaganda.  This was one incident, which we surely wish would not have happened, but which also does not give the incumbent phone companies any reason to tar all VoIP service with the same brush – in fact, until the investigation is complete and all the facts are known, it doesn’t even give them the right to say anything bad about that particular VoIP company.