Gillian Shaw
Sun
Calling 911 from your cellphone will soon alert emergency responders to your location, under a new enhanced 911 service being implemented at Vancouver‘s regional emergency communications centre E-Comm.
Vancouver‘s centre will be the first in Canada to have the technology. The trial is going on now, with the service expected to be fully implemented here by November, ahead of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
It will then be rolled out across the country.
The enhanced 911 service will take advantage of GPS (global positioning system) on GPS-enabled cellphones to zero in on a caller’s location.
Now, 911 centres in Canada can locate only the cell tower the call is transmitting from, information that could cover kilometres, making it difficult to pinpoint a location in the case of calls from people who can’t communicate that to the 911 operators.
E-Comm president Ken Shymanski said the search area could be narrowed to 10 to 300 metres.
“This will be of enormous benefit to the 911 personnel and first responders trying to help.”
Shawn Hall, spokesman for Telus, a partner in the initiative, said the move puts Canada in the forefront of enhanced 911 services.
“We are going to be bringing in the most advanced wireless location technology in the world,” he said. “It is advanced technology so there will be bugs to work out of the system and this trial is going to allow us to do that before we implement enhanced 911 across Canada.”
The 911 service will rely on a range of technology options every time a call comes in.
For callers with GPS-enabled phones, the service will be able to pinpoint their location as long as they are within range of GPS satellites.
In cases where the satellite signal is blocked or phones are not GPS-enabled, the system would use cell tower triangulation to narrow down a location.
The second system isn’t as accurate but is still better than the original and final resort — the single cell tower from which the call is transmitting.
“The system will automatically flip through all technologies and within a few seconds it should be able to pass that information along to the 911 operating centre,” said Hall.
Hall said privacy issues were part of the discussions ahead of the CRTC mandating the service.
“That was definitely a concern,” he said. “You have to weigh all of that but in the end when people are calling 911 they want help and they want it right now.”
Hall said the GPS locating service only kicks in when people call 911.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun