iTECH: E911 -- When Will Trucking and the Public See It?

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he Federal Communications Commission has mandated development of a national enhanced wireless 911 network — or E911 — by 2005. Such a network, experts say, would mean that public safety call centers across the United States would be able to locate exactly cellular telephone users making emergency calls.

The benefits to anyone traveling the highways and smaller roads of the nation, particularly truckers, are obvious. No matter where a driver happens to be, he could call for help using a cell phone instead of having to leave a vehicle on a roadside to track down a land line.

Currently, 98% of the U.S. population can quickly be located when making emergency calls from residential, land-line phones. However, the number of emergency calls made via cellphones has risen to 25% and Department of Transportation officials report that less than half of those calls are covered by E911.

The reality of developing a network — bridging incompatible cellular technologies, getting competing technology vendors and states to work in harmony, mobilizing a wide variety of agencies in all 50 states and sorting out whether or not to impose government regulations — is proving daunting, according to many players who made comments to the FCC on E911 in March.

For the full story, see the July/August issue of iTECH, which appeared as a supplement in the July 7 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.