911? Where's Your Emergency?

The Problem

What if you are a teleworker calling from your laptop VoIP client and you are not in your office? Will your emergency call go to the correct Public Safety Answering Point? Can emergency teams find you? Will someone on site be automatically notified? 

What is the Law?

NENA, the National Emergency Number Association has also been taking steps to encourage legislation at the state level, but the fact of the matter is that very few states (only 14 in fact) actually have any Enterprise PBX related 9-1-1 laws on the books requiring the implementation of any additional functionality that would allow for a 9-1-1 dispatcher to obtain more accurate location information from a PBX. Quite often this technology actually exists, and is often left un-provisioned in many PBX systems installed today.

E911 in the News

There have been stories in the news over the years of people who have experienced significant delays in emergency services response, or worse yet actually died, due to the telephone system not having 911 implemented properly. For example, a terrible tragedy that occurred back in April of 2006 as reported in the Washington Post. It was reported that an employee called 9-1-1 from his office to report that he was having a heart attack. He was unable to communicate his location to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, and local EMS responded to the address that appeared on their screen. Unfortunately the address displayed was that of the Main building, just across the street, and when EMS arrived a search of the building proved unsuccessful. Some 10 hours later a cleaning person found the victim’s body on the floor of his office.[2]  

• Business imperative initiative for the protection of valuable company assets including people
• Homeland security issue to prevent incidents from becoming catastrophes
• Moral imperative and ethical responsibility to your employees and those on your property
• Imperative requirement from both a legal and liability perspective to protect the organization
• Regulatory requirement as mandated by those states having legislation
   

Addressing E911 in Enterprise PBX environments

While convergence of voice and data services onto an Internet Protocol (IP) network has a number of significant advantages, it presents new challenges to the Enterprise 911 solution. Fortunately, Nortel has technology solutions today to enable enterprises to answer these concerns and provide effective emergency services to their users, regardless of the technology used to deliver those services.

How E911 Works in North America

With today’s E911 system, The PBX can automatically send the PSAP operator information about the location of the caller via Caller ID, called an Emergency Location Identification Number or ELIN. The Local Exchange Carrier routes the 9-1-1 call with the ELIN to a specialized E911 Tandem Office or Selective Router. At this point, the ELIN is matched against a special Master Street Address Guide database that returns the physical location associated with the caller’s telephone number as well as the appropriate PSAP servicing that address.  

Finding 911 Callers within Traditional and IP Networks

With an enterprise PBX the 911 call may use a common Caller ID or ELIN for all users serviced by the main PBX equipment, and not one specific to the caller’s station location. Fortunately, most PBX systems today can be provisioned to send a specific Caller ID that is relevant to the caller’s specific location, such as “Fourth Floor, Aisle 5, Cube 468C.” Administrators properly provisioning this information in the PBX are the critical missing pieces of the puzzle today. Automatic location identification is only one challenge to E911 services within enterprise phone systems. Additional challenges for today’s enterprise administrator include: 

• Automatic notification to on-site emergency personnel that a 9-1-1 has occurred to allow a local first response
• Providing Enterprise 911 coverage to telecommuters and home office workers
• Ensuring that whether employees dial an access code or not (“9-911” or “911”) still get an outside connection to the PSAP

Technology solutions are now available to empower PBX systems to provide these capabilities. These challenges cover technical implementation as well as re-visiting 911 policies in an enterprise network, and these issues must be addressed in tandem. Some examples of these techniques are: 

• Dividing up locations into physical 9-1-1 zones known as Emergency Response Locations, or ERLs with individual routing properties and ELINs
• Auto-discovering the ERL when an IP telephone registers with the call server by deploying a Location Information Service (LIS) in the network
• Discovering via DHCP and utilizing the IP address subnet for emergency zones
• Providing On Site Notification to local users via Screen Pops, Emails and SMS
• Properly provisioning emergency numbers in the system to be recognized emergency numbers as well as those dialed with an access code
• Providing access to other common international Emergency numbers such as 999, or 112 if you have an internationally diverse employee population that may be more familiar with these numbers

For example, let’s say you left your San Francisco home and arrived in the New York office. When you plug your soft-phone-enabled laptop into the data network in the New York office, the PBX recognize the new registration and queries the LIS to provide updated ERL information to the PBX emergency service database. If you were to make an emergency call from this location, the call server would now have the proper knowledge on how to handle the call such as trunk selection, the proper ELIN, and on-site notification parameters as appropriate for your current physical location in the New York office, and not the San Francisco location associated with the IP user. 

Nortel addresses this issue by using intelligence in the CS 1000 system software to route emergency calls based on the device’s discovered location, and not the user. ALI updates are not necessary for tracking these transient, mobile locations since we rely on properly pre-provisioned ALI records for each physical ERL within the enterprise environment.

Updating the PSAP ALI database

As we discussed earlier, ALI describes the physical location associated with the caller’s telephone number which must be kept current in telephone company databases. Using the ERL approach, the ALI records remain static and we adjust the users 9-1-1 profile based on location. In some instances, enterprises may choose to provide a more granular level of location resolution rather than a zone based on ERL. Although this provides station level granularity to the PSAP, constant adds/moves/changes must be managed and updates made to the ALI database. The Nortel Developer Program group continues to work with technology partners to provide the necessary interfaces and information for automating ALI database management. These Developer Program partners provide value-added E911 management applications that help the enterprise manage administrative activities pertaining to location discovery and ALI database maintenance. For a current list of Developer Program partners and their compatible products, please see http://nortel.com/compatible.

On-site notification (OSN)

In most cases, On-site personnel require immediate notification of an emergency situation. The first responders, the front-gate guard, security office and facilities personnel, among others, could very well be instrumental in responding to and/or containing the emergency. On-site personnel can be dispatched to meet the Public Safety responders to assist with location specific information, as well as take appropriate action, such as the evacuation of a building, to minimize the impact of the emergency. On Site Notification (OSN) is even more critical in IP environments, because users are more mobile. With the Nortel Emergency Services Access (ESA) features, an on-site alert can be delivered to a designated personnel providing critical caller information. The built-in Nortel OSN capabilities coupled with those provided by our Developer Program partners can provide alternate means such as Screen Pop, Email and SMS notifications to appropriate On Site personnel. [3]

Taking advantage of third-party solutions: open interfaces

In any enterprise, the emergency response system is tightly coupled into the operational environment, and can

benefit from a variety of third-party solutions that offer value as well as added functionality. Nortel’s Emergency Services solutions for the CS 1000 have always provided open interfaces for integration with third-party databases and solutions, and we are proud to continue that tradition in our enterprise portfolio for converged networks.

Summary

Converging voice and data services on an IP infrastructure offers significant advantages to enterprises in terms of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and new functionality. However, the same characteristics that represent IP’s greatest value propositions also present some new challenges for providing emergency services. The Enterprise Emergency Service policy must be revisited to determine the appropriate response to the variety of call scenarios that convergence makes possible.  

This goes far beyond technical implementation and includes education and notification of users and the enterprise support staff. An effective private E911 enterprise solution for a converged network environment must meet the following requirements: 

• Provide comprehensive Emergency Service functionality
• Meet legislative 911 requirements while achieving reliability and availability targets
• Support mobility, with dynamic location determination and call treatment
• Support IP client access devices, such as IP phones and IP Softphones
• Provide the right balance of granularity versus complexity to implement corporate policy on E911 services, administration, and security
• Provide open interfaces that enable value-add solutions from third-party vendors to complement the base solution
• Provide interoperability across platforms, to support a consistent user experience in heterogeneous networks
• Reduce the complexity of system administration in an environment where user-driven adds, moves, and changes will be commonplace

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.