You probably know your enterprise has a regulatory obligation to maintain E911 connectivity for your users - but you’re also responsible for meeting your users’ expectations. As citizens, we assume that if we needed to dial those three critical digits right now, help would be on the other end of the line.
But 911 emergency support doesn’t just happen without planning. And when you migrate your telephony to the cloud, it’s critical that you not break that essential connection, which can happen if you don’t complete the migration with experts.
Keep reading to learn:
- How your connection to 911 can break when you migrate your telephony to the cloud
- How to maintain your 911 connection through a migration
- How to stay compliant with state and federal regulations throughout a migration
How you’re connected to 911
Historically, to support 911, IT departments often had to maintain TDM, PRI, or POTs circuits into the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the roughly 6,000 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in the U.S. and Canada. This means an administrator has to provision end user location information into the Automatic Location Information (ALI) databases for all PSAPs where a user could call 911. In other words, if you have users in multiple jurisdictions (campuses, counties, states), you’ll need to provision location information into all of those databases.
It’s set up like this:
How the 911 connection can break
The future’s in the cloud. And, because TDM/PRI/POTs circuits are expensive to maintain, moving communications there makes good economic sense. But when enterprises rip out these pricey circuits in favour of cloud communications, they may also rip out their connection into public safety.
Here’s what happens when a company eliminates their TDM/PRI/POTs circuits without an E911 solution in place:
When we speak with our customers, many of them know this, so we find that they hold onto at least one dedicated circuit into the PSTN for 911 calling. But by doing so, they forfeit many of the benefits of moving to the cloud in the first place!
911 considerations for cloud migrations
Safe, fast, cost-effective E911 connectivity in the cloud is possible, but requires the right partner with a strong understanding of how emergency services work. Here are some key questions to ask when you’re planning your E911 migration and support:
- Where are your users located?When a VoIP server is housed in a central office, 911 calls that originate from anywhere within the company may automatically be directed to the PSAP where the server is located—not necessarily the location where the 911 call is placed.So if you have a multi-site campus and an employee calls 911 from campus A, but your switch is located on campus C, the ambulance could arrive at campus C— potentially miles from the person in need.It’s important to note here that most PSAPs are not directly interconnected, so if the above scenario happens, 911 call takers have to manually transfer calls to the correct jurisdiction—and frankly, this only happens if they have those transfer procedures in place. Valuable seconds if not minutes are lost during this process, which can significantly degrade emergency response times
- Are your users fixed or nomadic?Instead of relying on desk phones, we see more and more organisations deploying softphones to support collaboration and mobility. Makes sense: employees unpinned from fixed locations have the freedom to collaborate in other buildings, across campuses or across the country. This is great for flexibility and productivity, but makes it logistically complicated to locate 911 callers
- Are you consuming voice, SIP trunking and E911 from different providers? We often come across organisations having to manage multiple providers as they transition to the cloud. Not only does this make it harder to demonstrate ROI, organisations can lose control over the quality of service when their voice provider is outsourcing 911 to 3rd parties
How to stay connected to 911
By working with a nationwide, cloud-based E911 solution provider like Bandwidth, you can eliminate costly dedicated circuits and still provide 911 support and connectivity into PSAPs across the U.S. and Canada. In fact, you can do it confidently. Here’s how.
Bandwidth’s nationwide network connects directly (and securely and redundantly) to all of the 911 tandems, or selective routers (SRs), that deliver emergency calls to public safety. So all our customers have to do is connect their VoIP switch to Bandwidth, and we route 911 calls to the appropriate PSAPs while ensuring that an accurate provisioned address, caller name and callback number displays on the dispatcher’s monitor.
Here’s how a true cloud 911 solution looks:
