Denver Testing New 911 Cell Phone Technology
January 19, 2009
By Dave Young, KDVR-TV
DENVER – As more Americans cut the cord to their landlines and rely solely on cell phones, they’re unknowingly putting themselves at risk in an emergency.
Mobile 911 callers can sometimes be difficult to locate because the current 911 system uses 45-year-old technology based on addresses and pinpointing cell phones leaves a wide margin for error.
Now, Denver is the first city in the nation to test the new 911 Indoor Location Technology. Unlike any other system, it gives dispatchers a room-by-room layout of where the cell phone call is coming from.
More than 60 percent of the 911 calls coming in to Denver’s dispatch center are now from cell phones. But current technology gives 911 operators limited ability to pinpoint the location of the caller. They could be off by as much as three football fields even in best cases.
“We’re back to doing 911 the ‘old school’ way (asking) ‘Where are you? What’s your location?’ And we’re looking for landmarks that people can identify that can help us locate their position,” said Denver 911 Executive Director Carl Simpson.
But when a 911 call is made from an enabled cell phone in a pre-wired Denver apartment building near the University of Denver, Blue Tooth technology sends a signal through devices smaller than a sprinkler head, through the internet with the exact location of the caller.
As the 911 call comes in to the dispatch center, an on-screen display gives the emergency operator not only the street address, but the building layout, the exact floor and room number the call is coming from.
“To locate people outside of just a cell tower which could be a mile area, quarter mile area to give them the exact floor and roomÂ…that’s really the next generation,” said Steve Artim, CEO of Wireless Werx, which developed the technology.
Denver’s the first free test market for this indoor location technology, but in order for it to work the buildings have to be wired.
“Once they work out the bugs in it and it works consistently and on a more widespread basis throughout the city, it could really be a great tool,” said Carl Woehrle, a Denver 911 dispatcher.
As more people depend solely on wireless phones, 911 reliability becomes a growing challenge.
“This tool is amazing because it helps us find people calling 911 from their cell phones,” said Carl Simpson who runs Denver’s 911 system.
As this technology becomes more widely available, experts hope it will be cheap enough for apartment and office buildings to pay for having buildings wired. This only works with cell phones, so your office hard-wired phone would not be affected.
Denver taxpayers are not paying for the trial use of this system.
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