NG911 Order Will Help Speed Transition but Not as Much as Funding Would: NENA

Don't expect big changes in the next-generation 911 draft order that's set for a vote during the FCC commissioners' open meeting Thursday, a 10th-floor official tells us. While the order should help facilitate the NG911 transition, a quicker route would come if Congress found the roughly $15 billion that states and localities likely need for deployment, said Jonathan Gilad, National Emergency Number Association (NENA) government affairs director. Minus federal funding, "it will always be a haves and have-nots situation," with some localities and states more financially able than others to afford the transition, he said. The FCC said the order is aimed at accelerating the NG911 rollout (see 2406270068).

Transitioning from legacy 911 to NG911 is "an entire forklift upgrade," said Brandon Abley, NENA chief technology officer. "Everything needs to be replaced." A lot of E911 networks "are still operating in the telephony world" of network infrastructure and need to be replaced with IP networks, he said. Abley said there also is a sizable cost in operating legacy and NG911 systems simultaneously during the transition. Meanwhile, legacy network infrastructure is old and scarce, with considerable costs for maintaining switched networks, he said.

The draft order sets out two phases of deadlines for the transition, with originating service providers (OSPs) delivering IP-based 911 traffic in the first phase and NG911-formatted traffic in the second, with those phases being 12 to 24 months. Under the draft order framework, 911 authorities must meet "readiness criteria" before requesting that originating service providers start delivery of NG911 traffic, with that valid request coming before time frames start. It also lets OSPs and 911 authorities agree on alternative time frames. In many cases, those first- and second-phase requests will arrive at the same time, as some NG911 systems are already operational, Abley said. He said work has started on creating guidance for prepping systems prior to that valid request.

The NG911 order comes as a major focus of the 911 community is NG911 system interoperability. During a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration webinar Tuesday, Budge Currier, NG911 Interoperability Task Force chairman, discussed efforts that ensure interoperability of NG911 systems and components. The goal is NG911 systems that are like Lego sets, where bricks purchased today and those from decades ago lock together, said Currier, assistant director-public safety communications, California's Office of Emergency Services. The big hurdle to that Lego-like system is NENA's i3 standard, which at 600-plus pages has more than 200 references to other standards, Currier said. Dealing with that complexity prompts collaboration events where vendors bring their systems together and validate that they are interoperable and standards compliant, he said. The NG911 interface rules in the draft order "would really get things moving on the carrier side" toward hastening the transition, Currier said.