Different Roads to E911 Compliance
From Billing World and OSS Today
By Michelle Hankins
September 2005
Speakeasy: Selling Safety
At a time when most emerging voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service providers were racing to push out services and capture market share, one U.S. company delayed its entry into the market by six months for one reason: E911.
Speakeasy launched its VoIP service in September 2004. From its inception, Speakeasy has used its 911 compliance as a marketing tool. The company operates its own private fiber-optic national network, providing broadband services in most metropolitan areas within the continental United States.
The company waited until it had developed a plan it thought was solid before launching VoIP service, recognizing that some of the benefits of VoIP—being able to have a phone number outside a customer's rate center and being able to move a phone around while traveling—were also the same things that could jeopardize a customer's safety, should a 911 call need to be made.
Therefore, to ensure that all of its customers have access to 911, Speakeasy chose to offer VoIP only in combination with its broadband service. Because the broadband connection is at a fixed address and the phone can only be used via the broadband connection, the company is aware of the customer's address, can provide the service address for 911 purposes and can route calls to the appropriate public safety answering point (PSAP) to dispatch emergency services. Because the service requires a static IP address tied to the broadband service, if a customer moves a phone it will not work.
Although Speakeasy may have enjoyed its early position on 911 in the VoIP market, the company's ability to tout safety superiority will be short-lived. Speakeasy President and CEO Bruce A. Chatterley says the company made the decision to be fully 911 compliant because it believed it was only a matter of time before the FCC would require 911 compliance of VoIP providers. That mandate has been set for November 28.
Speakeasy is working with wholesaler Level 3 Communications to provide its underlying E911 infrastructure. Level 3 accomplishes E911 compliance via direct trunking, enacting network trunks to routers serving more than 2,260 U.S. rate centers. The company employs a specialized switching infrastructure and an interconnection plant with local phone companies.
Level 3 has spent the last 21 months deploying its E911 infrastructure. As of June, the company's coverage area totaled 73 million households, or 66 percent of the U.S. population. The company expects to expand its E911 footprint to cover more than 70 percent of the United States by the end of the year. Level 3 became a member of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) this year as part of the non-profit's technical roundtable that aims to outline technical functionality that will help facilitate E911 services.
Chatterley explains that as a small but growing VoIP provider, working with Level 3 made more sense for the company than striking deals with the ILECs, as companies such as Vonage have already begun doing with Verizon, SBC and BellSouth for nomadic E911 for VoIP. Going with the ILECs to support E911 means negotiating multiple contracts with several companies and undertaking multiple integration projects—one with each ILEC.
With Level 3, Chatterley explains, the wholesaler prices to scale and builds in "disruptive pricing" and economies of scale that help growing VoIP providers facilitate E911 capabilities. Speakeasy pays Level 3 for E911 on a per subscriber basis.
Speakeasy does not presently charge a fee on its bill for E911. The company built this function into its cost structure when pricing services from the beginning. "Never say never, but we have no plans currently to charge [for E911]," Chatterley says.
Vonage: Enlisting Partners
Companies like Vonage do not control the high-speed connection to the customer's site. They also do not have access to traditional 911 services, even though many subscribers may assume they do when they enlist the service in their home.
Currently, Vonage is facing lawsuits in two states over this issue. Customers who activate Vonage's 911 dialing service are often directed to administrative lines and might only receive a recorded message outside regular business hours. Even if a customer can reach an emergency operator, the operator does not have access to the caller's address and might not have automatic access to the caller's phone number. Besides that, customers must sign up and self-provide their address for the 911 feature. If they move or use the phone somewhere other than the address they give, they must remember to change their address with Vonage.
Similar to cordless phones, the company's VoIP devices rely on an external power source to operate and are unusable during outages, posing another possible safety risk.
Vonage has enlisted Intrado and TeleCommunications Systems to deliver more reliable E911 service to all of its customers in the future. The partnership aims to solve the E911 requirements for static, nomadic and future mobile VoIP customers. TCS will provide automatic location identification steering, call routing, call center and additional services to help Vonage comply with the federal mandate. The company also struck deals to collaborate with Verizon, SBC and BellSouth to support nomadic E911.
As part of the Verizon partnership, Intrado will place the customer's number into the automatic location information (ALI) database and provide routing instructions. These instructions will guide the call to the appropriate PSAP, where the operator can pull the caller's address and phone number from the ALI database and dispatch emergency personnel as needed.
The Vonage-Verizon-Intrado E911 solution is slated for implementation by November 2005. Vonage expects to be able to provide a caller's location and call-back number to emergency personnel for 911 calls originating in three of the four major regional Bell operating company territories by the end of the year.