Re: Happy New Year and E911

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>The irony of a Canadian commenting on 
>Moronic Leadership goes beyond funny. I'm 
>a Canadian and I'd gladly trade the corrupt, 
>self-serving, spineless, public-trust-abusing 
>rat-weasel we've got for GWB. And I live 
>right at the edge of Ottawa, so if anyone 
>ought to know....
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>3. When I worked in E911 stuff, my 
>company (prime system integrator for the 
>RCMP) had a couple of programmers and 
>some GIS types involved in developing a 
>car location -> map location and an 
>incident location -> map location (based of 
>ANI/ALI information returned by the E911 
>interfaces from various E911 systems). 
>Myself, I wrote the protocols for our 
>system to handle feeds for an arbitrary 
>number of E911 protocols (Canada, not 
>counting Ontario, has at least 11 I know of) 
>in arbitrary combinations. I wonder if 
>anyone realized that might be patent 
>infringing?
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Actually it probably wasn't patent infringing. The 911 message protocols
are in the "public domain" and could be interfaced by anyone (I wrote
an interface for San Antoneo, Texas before I worked for the 911 group).
The problem came when other changed  the system.

One of AT&T competitors beat it's response times on the PSAP (Public
Safety Answering Point) by anticipating a call.

AT&T system: with 2 second REQUIRED initial response time:
receive call (with telephone number) -> pickup phone -> send request for

lookup->
display results

Competitors system:
receive call (with telephone number) -> send request for lookup-> pickup

phone ->
display results

Our competitors system was good until the San Francisco earth quake. The
911
system was swamped and many people would hang-up and then call back. Our

competitors
system would send every call to be looked up even if they did hang up. 
When the
backlog was flushed the response time for lookup had reached 30 minutes 
and for all
intents ALI (Automatic Line Identification) was dead. I hope no one else

died due to
these changes.

Our competitor was forced to change their system  to conform to post 
phone pickup to
send their request for lookup.

Scott Siebold

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