More and more people are getting rid of their traditional land line phones for a Wireless Cell Phones, VOIP and soft phones which is antiquating the existing 911 emergency system in the United States.
There is nothing worse than thinking the 911 emergency system is universal and working everywhere and standing over someone who just had a life threatening accident and you cannot reach the appropriate dispatch using your Wireless Cellular Phone. Without adequate help the person might die when if there was a working and updated 911 system, help could be just minutes away.
Many times the 911 caller is under stress and is yelling into the Wireless Cellular Phone and wants the person at the other end to provide some help immediately but is too stressed out to answer some basic questions describing their location. This is not only wasting precious time that the 911 attendant could be helping the 911 caller but also wasting valuable travel time for the necessary emergency respondents. 'I think I am at a certain location on a 100 mile stretch of highway really does not cut it in an emergency.' In the original design with land line phones, the phone numbers were assigned to specific addresses.
The problem is that money dictates the quality of any 911 system and the training of the people behind the phone. Rural areas do not have the resources available that they might have in urban areas. The rural areas should be spending what resources that they do have on training personnel. Their dispatch receiving equipment could be standardize and designed to just receive already processed data from a central location that receives the data from the internet or Wireless Cellular Phone providers. This location data could be sent by way of the internet for processing where it is translated into useful location information and then the system sends this already processed data to the right local dispatch and connects 911 caller with this correct local dispatch.
Presently one of the challenges is that the state or region in which the system is located also dictates how the 911 system works. There is no national standard and even though the FCC has continually made mandates since the 90's that the system should exist they never have mandated how the systems should work.
To be fair with the ever changing technologies it is a daunting task to come up with a 911 system that will work in all cases but with the present technology a workable system is possible.
In the 90's when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) first started making mandates, the technology just was not there to make it work. But the technology now exists to make it work but no one technology works in all situations. Each system needs to be made up of multiple systems that interact and decide which system will work best under what situation.
This level of complexity can be too pricy for any local area to take on and continually keep updated as the technology changes. This is why this decision making should be done at a central or regional processing station that decides which technology will work the best to locate the 911 caller. This decision making could be a form of artificial intelligence where the processing station knows about where the data is coming from and knows that the area is urban or rural area and which technology would work the best.
At some point this 911 system might become a dedicated internet that would only be used for emergency 911 calls and be set up as a high priority communications system with redundant equipment.