North American Network Operators Group

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Re: 911, was You're all over thinking this (was: Re: Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service)

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Jul 25 07:20:41 2005

On 25-jul-2005, at 12:54, Brad Knowles wrote:

<rant> And why should the UK change its numbering system just because
a few dumb Yanks who can't be bothered to learn local customs? Does
999 get through to the emergency services in the NANP? Does 112 work
on non-GSM phones? How about Australia's 000? </rant>

It would be nice if everyone in the world could agree on a single "emergency services" number, which would work when dialed from all types of communication devices.
This makes no sense at all. Here in the Netherlands we changed from local numbers (which were great, dial 222333 and I'd actually get a The Hague fireman on the line, but finding the phone book first when attending an out of town emergency is of course less than desirable) to a country-wide number (06-11) in the 1990s, and then to the European number 112 (which I'm sure is costing lives as we speak: you first have to hold for a stupid OPERATOR whom you have to TELL what service and where you want to talk to and then AGAIN hold for the actual service). They knew 112 was in the works when they changed to 06-11, BTW.

Anyway, my point being: the current numbers have been drilled into our subconscious very effectively. Throwing that away woulde be an amazing waste of time and money.

What should happen instead is that everywhere, the most common ones are made to work as additional CNAMEs for the local one.

This whole "single number" hype should end anyway. 10 years ago the Dutch phone company had at least five different numbers: for b2c sales, b2b sales, outages, billing and so on. Now they only have one number but you have to waste time navigating through a "voice response" maze. That's not what I call progress.

Oh yes: </rant>