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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 08:06:15 2005 
On 25-jul-2005, at 13:45, Brad Knowles 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.



As someone else already pointed out: systems like ISDN, GSM and VoIP
look at the whole number, not at the individual digits as they come
in, like POTS. So 911 and 9114567 are different 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.



That may be a bit much, but I think 112 and 911 would be a good start.



But a real solution would be for the terminal to deduce that the user
is trying to call an emergency number and then dial the correct
number, whatever that may be at the current location at the current
time.




 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,



Do you think there are numbers like this? Here in NL there was a
drastic renumbering 10 years ago, about half the country got a new
number. That was to allow 00 for int'l, 0800 and 0900 and 1xx. I
don't think anyone feels like doing it again. :-)




 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.




Actually their system isn't that bad compared to others. But it still
sucks compared to having different numbers that immediately connect
you to the right person.




However, just because you can create badly designed IVR systems
does not necessarily mean that all IVR systems should be outlawed.



No, they should be outlawed because even the good ones are incredibly
annoying, and the bad ones lead to suicide.




 Likewise with emergency services numbers. They need to be well-
designed, yes.



Unfortunately they leave a lot to be desired. Good reason to stay
healthy and avoid accidents.




But they needn't be outlawed unversally just because some people
are incompetent and cannot create one that works properly.


Who said anything about stuff being outlawed?