What about the emergency services (E911)?
The emergency service (911 and E911) controversy has been greatly over exaggerated in the media; What most people don’t know is that more then 80% of the US does not have any type of 911 service. That’s right! In MOST places in the US you either can not dial 911 or if you can the call is just routed to the receptionist at the local sheriff’s office or some place like that.. Nearly 80% of the people in the US live in about 20% of the area geographically. These cities may be best recognized by the fact that most of them have a local football or basketball team, and are even some times referred to as the NFL cities. These area have E911 service in MOST of the local calling area but how does the telephone companies 911 service work? The caller ID information passes along with the listed address information to the emergency service city and service are dispatched. But what if you phone company listing is old? Sadly the phone company’s directory listing often is the least updated set of information of any telecom services
Compare this system to VoIP which not only allow the customer to update their information whenever they want to as often as they need to, but also some VoIP service can have much more additional information for the emergency operator to attempt to get all the information possible. Services like emergency response buttons can be tied through VoIP provider and not only contact emergency service but even a whole list of people. Schools are using advanced versions to proactively notify not only the police but they can also call all the numbers on file for all the parents and let them know there is an emergency at the call and any information that needs to be given to the parents about the emergency.
Once again you can see – The more we adopt VoIP the more that becomes possible.
