By Cade Metz in San Francisco for The Register. This story has
been reproduced with permission.
Last week, as reported by the
CBC, a Calgary family dialed 911 via their internet phone
service when 18-month-old Elijah Luck went into medical distress.
Their VOIP provider, Comwave, then dispatched an ambulance to the
family's former home in Mississauga, Ontario, more than
twenty-five-hundred miles away.
After waiting over half an hour, the family said, they made
another emergency call from a neighbor's land line phone. An
ambulance arrived within six minutes, but the toddler was later
pronounced dead at the Alberta Children's Hospital.
"This is a first for Canada, and it's a tragic one," Paul Godin,
a spokesperson for te Canadian Radio-Television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the country's telcom
regulator, told The Reg. "This was a very young boy."
Comwave did not respond to requests for comment. But according
to the
CBC, the company did not have the family's latest
address on file, and it says that customers are responsible for
providing the company with updated emergency information. This is
confirmed by Godin.
With traditional phone lines and so-called "fixed" VOIP lines
provided by cable operators, emergency calls are automatically
routed to the nearest 911 call center. But certain "nomadic" VOIP
services don't map customers to a physical location, and 911 calls
must be routed manually.
"With nomadic 911, calls are channeled to an answering service
provided by your VOIP company," Godin explains. "And that answering
service channels your call to a 911 call center. So it's a two step
approach, rather than the one-step you get with a regular land
line."
Elijah Luck's aunt, Sylvia Luck, said that when she dialed 911
via Comwave's service, no one answered after five rings. Then she
received a call back from a call center than Comwave contracts with
in Concord, Ontario. Sylvia Luck said she gave the family's Calgary
address to the operator, but the ambulance was sent to
Mississauga.
The CRTC is investigating the call, but won't share details
until the investigation is complete. "We're just going over the
recording of the emergency call now and we need to analyze that
before we make a statement one way or another," Godin tells us.
The commission's rules require nomadic VoIP providers to explain
their 911 procedures when a customer signs up and remind them of
the procedures at least once a year. Elijah Luck's family switched
to Comwave's service three years ago, after moving to Calgary from
Mississauga.
"If I'm the nomadic vendor, I have explain to the customer the
limitations of my 911 services," Godin says. "And the customer to
sign a form that says they understand the shortcomings."
The CRTC is also working on a plan to improve nomadic 911
services. "We want to make this as good as other 911 services.
We're going through the various steps to make this happen. We need
to have everyone involved in the emergency systems to cooperate in
providing the right technology and we need to make sure the
technology works. The question is who will pay for this
infrastructure upgrade."
© The
Register 2008
