Wow, E911 Has Finally Come Along

from the never-thought-we'd-see-the-day dept

For years, there's been talk of how 911 service needed to include the ability for a mobile phone user's location to be sent to call centers when they made an emergency call. The implementation has taken ages, thanks to toothless government "crackdowns" and constantly backpedaling deadlines. Another big reason was that tax money intended to upgrade call centers to be able to receive the info was instead spent on winter boots and ballpoint pens. So it was with some surprise that we saw 95 percent of the US population now lives in an area with 911 call centers that can receive their location from a wireless phone, and over 90 percent of individual call centers in the US have the ability. That's quite a milestone for a program that looked for a long time like it was going nowhere; hopefully implementation of the next 911 upgrade won't take nearly as long.

Filed Under: e911