Re: E911 and appliances

Andrew Daviel wrote:
>
> There has been a fair amount of discussion of (US) E911 mandated action
> etc. and I wondered, broadly, how much of this really applied to the

I would be curious as to what other countries are doing. From all I can
tell, Europe mirrors the US almost exactly in its requirements, but I
haven't been able to find good information about Asia and Australia.

> Internet which is what I assume this WG is about.
>
> For instance, is any mobile device with voice capability (a laptop
> with a microphone ??) deemed to be a cellphone and fall under the E911
> aegis, or are we just assuming convergence and assuming that future
> 3G devices will all be Internet-capable and do VoIP or something ?

Among other things, third-generation wireless devices (3G, R5) will
carry IP all the way to the end system (handheld). Thus, the owner of
such a device will have the reasonable expectation that things work at
least as well as the existing 1G/2G devices.

Also, even if you ignore traditional PCs as sources of emergency calls,
there are now on the order of a million IP phones shipped per year,
mostly for large enterprises at this point. Various companies are
trialing VoIP for broadband (DSL and cable). Due to various technical
and financial hurdles, this so far hasn't been terribly successful, but
this could reach large numbers very quickly. Currently, these devices
are sold as "second line" devices, i.e., the carrier tells customers
that they should maintain their analog line, primarily for "lifeline"
service during power outages and for 911. This is clearly not a
long-term proposition unless we perceive of the Internet as always being
some kind of second-class infrastructure suitable only for
"recreational" use.

>
> I don't have a PDA myself so don't have personal experience, but I kind of
> think that something big enough to type on easily and to display a

The lack of a keyboard doesn't seem to interfere with the billion+ SMS
messages being sent each year...

> reasonable amount of text or graphics (like a map) isn't going to fit in a
> case the size of a phone, so that there will be wireless internet devices
> that are not phones and would not need to have any capability to connect
> to a designated national emergency service, (or whatever one calls
> generic 911).

Given that there are already 2G phones that incorporate PDAs (Kyocera
and others make them), the distinction will become largely academic.

>
> I may be totally wrong - maybe we'll have voice-activated sunglasses with
> a megapixel heads-up display that does everything, e.g. Steve Mann's
> system at eyetap.org.
>
> (I saw some Nokia 3G prototypes on a TV show recently -all with
> built-in video cameras)

If you're interested in 911 issues, you might take a look at
draft-schulzrinne-sip-911-01.txt

In terms of the discussion here, I suspect that we'll see more choices
as to how locations are being reported. However, given that people
dialing 911 are often not exactly in the clearest state of mind, I have
a hard time picturing a device that requires a user to make detailed
choices in a scroll-down menu as to the location accuracy while the
house is on fire.

This becomes a protocol issue only if the location information is
provided by "the network" instead of the end system. In the current
mobile systems, we have both approaches, with triangulation and such for
some systems and (typically, assisted) GPS for others. The latter tends
to be more precise, but also more expensive. If location is provided by
the end system, location privacy becomes a user interface issue, not
something we typically worry about in the IETF. We certainly can't
mandate a user interface. One would hope that we'll see different
approaches for different users, e.g., a simpler interface for phones
meant for children and those with limited cognitive capacity, with a
more sophisticated set of choices, on a per-device or per-call basis,
for others.

>
> --
> Andrew Daviel
Received on Fri Aug 17 12:25:39 2001