does it go to Watertown, Brookline, Boston, Needham, Wellesley, maybe even Framingham, when you dial 911?
In a Globe article last week, Peter DeMarco wrote: “…the 911 system failed my wife, Laura Levis, in 2016 when she collapsed from an asthma attack on a bench outside the emergency room of CHA Somerville Hospital. Although she told operators her location, the 911 system erroneously put her phone hundreds of feet away…”
The culprit? A non-reliable cell phone location system. If you’re at home and still have a landline, your call will be routed through the City’s 911 system with your exact address indicated. But if you are out and about, dependent on your cell phone to show where you are, don’t bet on it.
What happens in Newton when you dial 911 on your cell phone? Which carriers go to the State Police? How much time is lost? If you break your ankle in Cold Spring Park, will coyotes eat you before the message gets to the Newton Fire or Police Departments? I don’t know the answer, but I would like to!
In Newton you also have to make sure you’re not on a street with a duplicate name, or make sure you give the operator the zip code if you are.
Does Verizon really offer landline service anymore? I’d think most people in Newton are actually on VoIP, which seems about as reliable as wireless. While a fixed address should be registered with the account, it’s not uncommon for 911 or 311 calls to be misrouted. A 911 test from my phone was once answered by a national emergency service in Colorado.
Landlines are robust in emergencies. As long as Verizon supports the FIOS system, I will stay on it ! It doesn’t go out with either internet or electrical “outages”. Belt and suspenders.
Probably your best bet is to hail a Lyft or an Uber to the hospital.
@Adam – Anything FiOS is digital, FiOS Digital Voice specifically is VoIP to the ONT which then gets converted to copper for devices within the house. It does play nice with things like alarm systems that don’t normally work with VoIP but it’s not regulated as a POTS. Their other phone service is treated as POTS but it still goes over a digital line to the ONT and not copper. In either case phone service only works if the ONT has power.
I think Verizon did do some tweaking to FDV so that it functions like a POTS line even though it’s using VoIP as opposed to traditional VoIP services like Vonage.
What about RCN?
911 calls are routed roughly as follows.
For landlines (including FiOS, Comcast, etc), your phone number is associated with your street address in something called the Master Street Address Guide (MSAG). When you call 911 from that number, the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), looks up you phone number in the MSAG and dispatches the emergency services to that address.
Each community in the US generally has its own PSAP. There are approximately 6100 PSAPs in the US.
If you have a VoIP service (like Vonage), you will register your street address and the system works as above.
For mobile phones, the system is different. The basic system uses triangulation from the cell towers to determine the location of the device, and hence the PSAP to which the call should be routed. Modern smartphones have GPS chips which can provide much more accurate data (to within 4 meters); and that will be used to determine the location of the person needing assistance.
However, accurate GPS location requires line-of-sight to the GPS satellites. When you are surrounded by tall buildings, or are inside a building, then the GPS fix may not be accurate.
@Sallee, I know there’s a battery back up for power outages (and superior marketing) but I’m surprised to learn FIOS VoIP phone service doesn’t go down with the Internet. Would love to learn more about this.
@Meredith, RCN worked very hard to get me off broadband phone service and on to voice over IP (VoIP) as it’s much cheaper for them and they said they were phasing out the old service. That was 10 years ago. I think most providers people are calling “landlines” actually use VoIP now. I think this makes E-911 routing more error prone than when it was done at the central office, but it’s still a lot better than cellular.
@Patrick/Robert, do you know if anyone in Newton actually has copper POTS or voice over broadband anymore?
@Adam – I would guess there are still people who have grandfathered service over copper but pretty sure all of the major providers (FiOS/RCN/Xfinity) are VoIP only for new customers. I’ve been using FiOS since it first rolled out around 2005 and even back then they physically disconnected copper as part of the install. One thing to note, at least with FiOS their VoIP stays completely within Verizon’s private network until it hits the PSTN. So it would be impacted if Verizon’s internal network has issues but it’s less of a risk than traditional VoIP services that go over public internet. As long as you have connectivity to Verizon their VoIP should work. I’d guess that the other carrier-provided VoIP services are similar.
The state has a high level guide around the different services and impacts during an emergency:
https://www.mass.gov/service-details/stay-connected-during-emergencies
@Patrick/@Adam
@Patrick wrote: “I would guess there are still people who have grandfathered service over copper but pretty sure all of the major providers (FiOS/RCN/Xfinity) are VoIP only for new customers.”
Actually, Patrick’s guess is not very accurate. I was one of the customers who had copper “grandfathered in” (I tried to make that argument myself) and I wanted to keep it in order to have enhanced 9-1-1- service and to have phone service during a power outage.
Several years ago, Verizon started sending me threatening letters to the effect that if I did not allow them to switch my copper wiring over to fiber optic lines, they would stop providing phone service for me. I don’t recall the exact wording they used in their letters, but they said that they were no longer able to repair copper lines and would not respond to any service requests. They also said something (when I spoke to them on the phone about this issue) about not being able to “provision” service anymore from a “central office,” which is an old method for provisioning phone line services. So, the bottom line was that after a certain date (which was a couple of years ago) they would no longer provide phone service for me if I insisted on staying on copper lines.
Given Verizon’s aggressiveness in my own case, I doubt that there are very many households (if any) in Newton still using copper phone lines. I think it’s a shame we lost this option because copper (POTS) is currently the most reliable way for people to communicate during a large-scale emergency situation where electric service, and possibly cellular service, are unavailable for many days.
@Ubiety, not surprising. VoIP is dirt cheap to provide. As one of their last landline customers, you must have been costing them a fortune. When Verizon abandons copper and switches around the city, if they haven’t already, much of their equipment and maintenance costs disappear. I’d be surprised if they don’t also sell the property on Washington Street…
I kept copper as long as I could because I used it to get reasonably priced DSL internet. Then Verizon switched my whole area to fiber, which they were allowed to do (as opposed to not being allowed to forcibly switch individual customers to fiber). I used FIOS while it was on the introductory low price, but once that expired, I dropped it and the landline altogether, since I’d only kept the landline for internet, and some sentimental attachment to the phone number that had been my parents’, then mine for decades.
Sorry…I thought we still had copper lines, but can’t guarantee that. We may simply have copper inside the house. We do have FIOS. However, we do have a back-up generator (natural gas-powered) so we don’t have meltdowns when electricity goes out. If both electric and gas go down, I guess I’d rely on my cell phone to call it in 🙁
To follow up on the previous discussion regarding Verizon withdrawing support for copper wiring, that’s definitely a thing in Newton. The Universal Hub has a good discussion of the topic here.