AT&T Wireless, Nokia sued over 911 calling
Jeff Meisner Staff Writer
seattle.bizjournals.com
Telecommunications experts say as much as 50 percent of all emergency calls now come in to public dispatchers from wireless phones.
But four years after federal regulators mandated that carriers, phone-makers and public safety agencies work out a plan to make wireless phones and networks capable of supporting emergency calls in a reliable manner, the task remains undone.
Consumers are starting to get ticked off.
Now a lawsuit has been filed against AT&T Wireless Services Inc. of Redmond and Finnish phone maker Nokia Corp., alleging the two companies have sold phones that do not support emergency 911 calls.
The suit, which seeks class-action status, names Enumclaw resident Julie McMurry as the lead plaintiff. Her attorney, Adam Gonnelli of New York City-based Faruqi & Faruqi LLP, said the lawsuit is an attempt to make the telecom industry live up to regulations put in place by the Federal Communications Commission in the late 1990s.
In May 1999, the FCC adopted a rule that requires analog cellular phones to include a separate capability for processing 911 calls that makes it possible for those calls to be handled by any carrier in a given region, regardless of whether the phone's owner is a subscriber.
The FCC gave all carriers until February 2000 to comply with the rule.
The lawsuit alleges that the San Diego-based Wireless Consumers Alliance Inc., a nonprofit consumer organization, tested eight different Nokia phone models — and none of the phones met the FCC's emergency 911 conditions.
Mike DiGioia, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, declined to comment, citing the company's policy of not commenting on pending litigation.
Telecom experts say the lawsuit is an indication of a much larger problem within the industry and those public agencies involved in making sure 911 calls are transmitted properly.
On the one hand, the McMurry case focuses on old analog cellular technology, which carriers have been phasing out in favor of all-digital networks since the end of the 1990s.
However, the carriers, phone-makers, network equipment manufacturers and public safety agencies are also far behind in the rollout of 911 capabilities for their digital networks.
The FCC's so-called "wireless e911" program is divided into two phases.
Phase one requires carriers to be able to report the telephone number of a wireless 911 caller and the location of the antenna that received the call.
Phase two requires carriers to be much more precise — they must be able to provide location information within 50 to 100 meters of a 911 caller, in most cases.
The FCC has given the carriers until Dec. 31, 2005, to comply with all these conditions.
However, all of the major carriers — including locally based players AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile USA Inc. and Western Wireless Corp. of Bellevue, and Nextel Partners Inc. of Kirkland — have been granted waivers on some of the requirements, which could cause further delays, analysts say.
David Hoover, a telecom expert at Precursor Research Group Inc. of Washington, D.C., said the main obstacle is getting carriers, equipment manufacturers and public safety agencies on the same page from a technology standpoint.
"It's going to be slow going," Hoover said. "This is a lot harder than anyone in the industry or at the FCC first thought it would be."
At the same time, the industry and regulators are under intense pressure from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to get the job done, especially in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"There's a huge public safety issue here because lawmakers want to be able to locate people in the case of a terrorist attack," he said.
While regulators have granted the carriers waivers, they don't seem willing to play around when they fall behind schedule. In October, AT&T Wireless paid a $2 million fine to the FCC for failing to meet its scheduled rollout of 911 capability.
Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., said the carriers aren't the only parties to blame for the delays, however.
"Everyone sees the carriers and the phone manufacturers as holding things up, but no one sees the public safety agency," Golvin said.
One problem police, fire and other emergency officials are running into is that their own networks use outdated technology, so their systems are not equipped to communicate with the carriers' networks.
Another unforeseen complication is the role of the wireline telephone companies, he said.
"The phone companies need to provide all the trunking lines that go into the public agencies' networks," Golvin said. "It's not just a question of simple deployment. The costs to support e911 capabilities by the phone companies wasn't taken into consideration."
The carriers don't have a strong incentive to comply with the costly FCC mandates, either, he said.
"From a business standpoint, the carriers are going to roll this stuff out as slowly as they can, because they don't have a suite of location-based services they can roll out to consumers to recover the costs," Golvin said.
Reach Jeff Meisner at 206-447-8505 ext. 103 or jmeisner@bizjournals.com. |
