Unified Communications

Hi folks, we do not yet have an E911 solution in place. We do, however, have our Avaya infrastructure all upgraded to 8.1, and the SIP J Series phones are working great in our test home offices. However, without an E911 solution (yes, I know we need one), is there *any* way to provide these to at-home workers with a clear conscience? Are big stickers on the phones that say "Don't dial 911 from this phone" the only option? Thanks.

Chip,
Have you looked at VPC providers, for instance Bandwidth.com?  There are others.

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Tom Lynn
Forum Moderator
Principal Engineer
Nordstrom, Inc.
Seattle
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-27-2020 05:19 PM
From: Chip Powell
Subject: At home SIP phones, no E911 solution

Hi folks, we do not yet have an E911 solution in place. We do, however, have our Avaya infrastructure all upgraded to 8.1, and the SIP J Series phones are working great in our test home offices. However, without an E911 solution (yes, I know we need one), is there *any* way to provide these to at-home workers with a clear conscience? Are big stickers on the phones that say "Don't dial 911 from this phone" the only option? Thanks.

Chip,

Who do you use as your regular dialtone provider that sends calls to 911 today?  For our workers in remote locations, we've been able to setup addresses with our PSTN provider and map the 911 entries to those remote locations.  Besides that type of setup, you are going to have to investigate looking into one of the big e911 providers like RedSky, Intrado, etc. There are also smaller players in the market that provide some interesting products as well (for example, 911Secure, who is deeply connected with Avaya).  In looking as some of the smaller providers, I've found them to be much more flexible in terms of pricing and configuration (for example, allowing us to only pay for off-campus users rather than everybody on our system).  

I wish there was something more -- but right now it's all we got.  I keep coming back that our sorry state of 911 comes back to the larger ILECs running the show -- and making sure that 911 was compatible with old COs that they never wanted to upgrade rather than push out functionality to make things work well and allow things like being able to push out addresses rather than rely on DID database matching.  That is starting to change a bit with NG-911, but the big ILECs are still running the show and locking us out of most of the tools to allow us to bypass the big 911 aggregators (NG911 is making it easier for cell phone companies to integrate -- and while the technology is there, they are being very slow to expose it to anybody outside of the ILEC and CLEC world).  There is a good chance that you won't get access to push out NG911 data before Ray Baum's act fully kicks in, unless you go through one of those providers.

-Nick

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Nick Kwiatkowski
Director of Design and Engineering
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-27-2020 05:19 PM
From: Chip Powell
Subject: At home SIP phones, no E911 solution

Hi folks, we do not yet have an E911 solution in place. We do, however, have our Avaya infrastructure all upgraded to 8.1, and the SIP J Series phones are working great in our test home offices. However, without an E911 solution (yes, I know we need one), is there *any* way to provide these to at-home workers with a clear conscience? Are big stickers on the phones that say "Don't dial 911 from this phone" the only option? Thanks.

Thank you for your responses, Tom and Nick. Tom, I don't know if 911 Secure is the VPC or if they contract with the VPC, but they were able to give me very reasonable pricing for such a service. If my management approves at-home SIP desk phones, we'll have 911 Secure provide a system where we input the employee's home address into the vendor's database. We'll modify our ARS tables to send 911 - when dialed from outside our network (but authenticated and connecting through the SBC) - to the vendor's number that goes to the VPC. 911 calls inside the network will route to our normal PSAP.

Nick, we've had zero luck with our ILEC with everything related to 911, so no, as you say, we won't be going down that route. I'm really glad there are other options these days.

Thanks as always for your input. DM me if you want more specifics about the solution we're looking at.

Original Message:
Sent: 09-04-2020 07:03 AM
From: Nick Kwiatkowski
Subject: At home SIP phones, no E911 solution

Chip,

Who do you use as your regular dialtone provider that sends calls to 911 today?  For our workers in remote locations, we've been able to setup addresses with our PSTN provider and map the 911 entries to those remote locations.  Besides that type of setup, you are going to have to investigate looking into one of the big e911 providers like RedSky, Intrado, etc. There are also smaller players in the market that provide some interesting products as well (for example, 911Secure, who is deeply connected with Avaya).  In looking as some of the smaller providers, I've found them to be much more flexible in terms of pricing and configuration (for example, allowing us to only pay for off-campus users rather than everybody on our system).

I wish there was something more -- but right now it's all we got.  I keep coming back that our sorry state of 911 comes back to the larger ILECs running the show -- and making sure that 911 was compatible with old COs that they never wanted to upgrade rather than push out functionality to make things work well and allow things like being able to push out addresses rather than rely on DID database matching.  That is starting to change a bit with NG-911, but the big ILECs are still running the show and locking us out of most of the tools to allow us to bypass the big 911 aggregators (NG911 is making it easier for cell phone companies to integrate -- and while the technology is there, they are being very slow to expose it to anybody outside of the ILEC and CLEC world).  There is a good chance that you won't get access to push out NG911 data before Ray Baum's act fully kicks in, unless you go through one of those providers.

-Nick

------------------------------
Nick Kwiatkowski
Director of Design and Engineering
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI

Original Message:
Sent: 08-27-2020 05:19 PM
From: Chip Powell
Subject: At home SIP phones, no E911 solution

Hi folks, we do not yet have an E911 solution in place. We do, however, have our Avaya infrastructure all upgraded to 8.1, and the SIP J Series phones are working great in our test home offices. However, without an E911 solution (yes, I know we need one), is there *any* way to provide these to at-home workers with a clear conscience? Are big stickers on the phones that say "Don't dial 911 from this phone" the only option? Thanks.