911 What is your emergency?
I need an actual address. Is there a condo right There at the beach?
I was trying to go off the beach to get an address.
Did she say where she is?
We're trying to find you on the map, sweetie. Your cellphone is hidden. OK? Icannot get this address to come up.
This right here happens far too often.
That's because more than 80 percent of 911 one calls are made from cellphonesand outdated landline era infrastructure makes it difficult for
911 centers to locate their callers.
According to regulators, location accuracy is a significant public safety concern, and fixing the
system could save over 10000 lives and at least 97 billion dollars.
You may never need to call 911, but if you do, it may be the most important call you ever make in your
lifetime. I can order a pizza on an app on my mobile device, and I can see that driver
delivering that pizza to my location.
Why does 911 not know where I'm at?
The 911 system is funded and run locally, but states and municipalities haven't been able to fix
shortcomings on their own.
Big tech companies like Apple, Android and Motorola, as well as a number of startups, are trying to
solve the technology gap.
But so far that hasn't been enough.
Candidly, I started out believing that, you know, some smart computer nerds could easily solve this
problem because it just seems so simple, right?
Like just take data from a smartphone and throw it on a web browser in front of a 911 agent.
And it's not until you go and you listen to calls and you realize the intensity.
What kind of vehicle are in?
Are you actually on route 10 or are you in the parking lot?
Where every single moment and second matters.
There's currently a draft proposal for legislation on a 15 billion dollar complete overhaul of the system.
But that's not a guarantee.
in the summer of 2020, A similar proposal didn't pass through the Senate.
We're tired of investing over and over and over in public safety and solutions that work for five
years. Then we throw it out and buy another one.
We need a coordinated wholesale move to next generation as a nation.
So why is the 911 system a service so instrumental to the safety of the public so broken?
And why isn't the federal government or the tech industry able to fix it?
Nearly every American, no matter their age, knows to call 911 in case of an emergency, but the
system is relatively new.
It was created by Congress in 1968 in conjunction with AT&T in a public private
partnership. It wasn't until 1987 that about 50 percent of the population had access to the
service. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that we started to see full scale adoption.
It's a much newer, younger system than people realize.
And so it doesn't have the history of strong funding of governance.
Sometimes these counties are mostly on their own and they may not have the technology
expertise, the procurement expertise.
And where did the accident take place?
This is one of the five thousand two hundred and eleven public safety answering points in America.
They're also known as PSAPs.
In the early days, all calls came from landlines.
Call centers had databases of every landline phone number and the street address associated with it.
So it was simple.
But cell phones changed everything like landlines, cell phones have an owner and a billing address.
But that doesn't say much about where a call is coming from.
I would remember Times where I could just feel my heart beating and racing, wanting to make sure that
I can help this person and do the very best that I could.
So, you know, back then, it was really important to know my city so well that I didn't
have to use a map to ask these questions.
But our cities get very complex and construction changes and we are even more mobile than we
used to be. And that also spans across generations.
You have children that are calling from mobile devices.
You have elderly folks calling from mobile devices and everything in between.
When a call comes to 911 from a cell phone, It bounces off of the nearest cell phone tower that directs them to
the nearest emergency call center.
But that can be unpredictable.
Sometimes calls are picked up by towers that are further away and that can have disastrous repercussions
911
what is the address of your emergency? I'm in a car in a lake. Where? A Well-known call from 2014 came from Chanel Anderson, who was just outside
of Atlanta, Georgia, now when Anderson called 911 after losing control of her car, her cell
phone was outside of the call centers district and the operator couldn't locate it.
Fairway.
I don't have that. Is that Milton? What city is that in? 30188. Ma'am I'm losingair very quickly. Anderson died a week later.
But there's another problem.
Even in cases when the call reaches the right phone center, it doesn't necessarily mean the operator can
quickly trace it to the right location.
That's because many cell phone carriers rely on something called triangulation, which locates callers by measuring
the distance between the towers that pick up the call.
That process locates a caller within 50 to 300 meters of where they are, depending on the type of technology
used. That's up to three football fields, which isn't too bad in a rural area.
But for a dense urban area, that distance can be intimidating.
Another big problem.
Neither of these technologies addresses altitude.
If Uber can find me, why can 911 not?
When you're talking a consumer app, you can roll out new technology pretty easily on these devices that are in our
hands. It's a pocket computer.
There have been countless attempts at updating technology as consumer behavior has changed.
First, it was enhance 911, that automatically read a caller's name, location and phone number.
Then, with the emergence of cell phones, the FCC introduced wireless enhanced 911 one location
accuracy rules for carriers.
Those regulations have been revised time and time again as carriers have pushed back against stricter
rules. By the early 2000s, the shortcomings of the 911 system had become too significant, and the
U.S. Department of Transportation launched its next Gen 911 initiative.
The goal was to transition the legacy system to IP based NG 911 technology that
could support things like text messages and video streaming.
centers would be able to receive, process and analyze all types of requests and share relevant
information with other centers and responders.
While substantial investments have been made by states and jurisdictions, adoption, training and funding
has been uneven.
Next Gen 911 has been challenged by two things.
One, lack of clear direction of accredited standards, as well as the inability of local
agencies to fund themselves up to the next level.
It's very expensive and it's much more complex than it used to be.
Funding for 911 is collected by telecommunication providers on wireline and wireless phone
bills in twenty nineteen states and other reporting jurisdictions collected over three billion dollars in
total 911 fees and charges.
How that funding was managed varied widely.
States including Florida, New York and Iowa barely covered costs.
Others, like Arizona, Massachusetts and Minnesota were left with a surplus.
While New York only covered three percent of costs with its fees, the data shows a troubling reality that has long
haunted advocates, diversion of funds.
In twenty nineteen, New York and four other states diverted over 200 million dollars of their collected fees
to purposes other than 911 between 2012 and 2013, a total of one point to eight
billion dollars was diverted to non 911 purposes.
Now, while it is legal, the FCC has found that it directly undermines public safety
communication and could put lives at risk.
But Captain Meyer is hoping that new legislation can stop that.
That's if Congress passes a 15 billion dollar bill to overhaul the system once and for all.
Technologies change and evolve.
That's why we look to the federal system to really help us look at it from a cybersecurity aspect, number one,
but also for an integration aspect, because we're talking about diversity of equipment connecting across these
IP networks in a very complex manner.
And if there are proprietary interfaces anywhere in between, they're not going to be able to talk.
Someone in a vehicle moving across municipal lines needs to be able to have their call handled by the
appropriate jurisdiction.
And those things happen so rapidly.
Now our technology is continually trying to catch up and playing catch up.
The federal government has stepped in and helped states and tribal nations with their 911 one services before.
in 2019, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Transportation announced a one hundred and nine
million dollar grant.
You're looking at 50 states, six territories.
That's not a lot of money.
And so it didn't really have the impact I think they thought it would have.
President Biden has been supportive of what we're trying to do.
So we want to move this forward This Congress.
In the past few years, a glimmer of hope for the 911 system has been the tech industry.
That call just came in the rapid S.O.S.
It did come up.
So it really shows you exactly where the complex that this gentleman lives in.
I think it's great.
This is Rapid S.O.S, a data integration platform used at this and about forty eight hundred other
peace apps around the country.
They're not changing anything in the existing infrastructure.
Instead, the software acts as a supplement.
But if you Notice, it says that the phone is rapid as capable.
So That's how we know that it has that possibility.
Not all phones do that.
The top of the hourglass is all this rich content and data.
Right? Like I'm wearing an apple watch right now.
My smartphones connected.
My building's connected.
Like there's something like twenty billion connected devices out there.
But in an emergency, none of that data, Right, Real time heart rate, preexisting health
conditions, precise location can be accessed by 911.
Because the connection point between the two is this drip, drip, drip of information that is
basically a 1960s analog voice call.
So what we do is turn this bottleneck into this rich data pipe.
That data comes from partners like Apple, Google, Sirius XM, Uber and Microsoft.
According to their own study of nearly five thousand 911 agency's.
Ninety two percent of dispatchers say that the system has sped up the response process.
We're getting amazing metrics coming off these phones so quickly.
It's better than what I'm getting on my Phase 2 wireless that I've had for many years.
But my concern will be long term is how do we continue to fund such a cool solution and
not put somebody in the poorhouse?
Rapid S.O.S.'s business model is simple charge companies like Uber and Apple, whose data
passes through their software and those who benefit the most from the success of 911 like insurance
companies. The company says it's supporting 150 million emergencies per year, covering about
92 percent of the country.
Though they've raised two hundred million dollars in funding, they're far from profitable.
While technology has been our partner, one hundred percent aligned.
We're together on this, but we're a small niche.
That's the problem.
When we look at what vendors are doing for Apple phones, they sell millions and millions
and millions of Apple phones, but there's only six thousand 911 centers in the United States.
So the scale makes it a challenge for us to get that innovation.
Rapid S.O.S is just one of many companies that's working on a solution.
Others include Apple, Android, Motorola and a number of startups.
And as of now, none of them have been able to make the dent necessary.
According to Mayer, the only way the over five thousand systems can get to a level playing field is
if the federal government steps up.
So far, that's yet to pass.
OK, and you said there's no injuries or you don't have a headache.
You didn't lose consciousness.