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

  • From: Brad Knowles
  • Date: Mon Jul 25 07:52:01 2005

At 1:18 PM +0200 2005-07-25, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

 What should happen instead is that everywhere, the most common ones are
 made to work as additional CNAMEs for the local one.
That doesn't work. As has already been demonstrated, there are numbers elsewhere in the world with 999 as their area code or local prefix, and I'm sure the same is true for 112, 911, and all the various other "emergency services" numbers. It's simply not possible to take all the various local numbers around the world and make them work globally as CNAMEs for whatever local area you may be in.

There's no sense in hoping for something that you know is completely impossible. It's a waste of your time and effort, and mine.


What might possibly be achievable is to take a single number that is universally available without conflicts, or where conflicts would be least painful to resolve, and make that work everywhere -- being made the equivalent of a CNAME for whatever the appropriate local area you may be in.

 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.
That's a failure in their IVR design, yes. However, just because you can create badly designed IVR systems does not necessarily mean that all IVR systems should be outlawed. Just because you can create badly designed web pages doesn't mean that all web pages should be outlawed.

Likewise with emergency services numbers. They need to be well-designed, yes. But they needn't be outlawed unversally just because some people are incompetent and cannot create one that works properly.


However, as I previously alluded to, these are long-term standards issues that would first need to be worked out with the ITU before there could possibly be any operational issues to be resolved.

--
Brad Knowles, <[email protected]>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.