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An FCC report released yesterday indicates that calling 911 from a cellphone in Washington, D.C. does not allow emergency responders to pinpoint most callers' locations.
"These results reveal an alarming public safety crisis,” former FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau chief Jamie Barnett said in the Find Me 911 Coalition's release. (Barnett now serves as the director of the Coalition.) “When nine in ten emergency callers in our nation’s capital cannot be located on wireless phones, we know that the requirements for location accuracy must be updated immediately."
All 911 calls are reported in two phases, according to HNGN. "Phase I" records the caller's phone number and the station that received the call. "Phase II" is location information, usually accurate within 50 to 300 meters. The report, first published by the Find Me 911 coalition, revealed that 90 percent of calls from the first half of 2013 were logged without accurate "Phase II" data.
A separate collection of data in the report, from July-September 2013, revealed that while Verizon and Sprint each report Phase II data in over a fifth of calls, T-Mobile reports only in slightly over 3 percent of cases. AT&T, the nation's largest mobile service provider, only provided from 2.6 percent of calls.