Net phone firms given 911 deadline

updated 10:48 p.m. ET May 19, 2005

WASHINGTON - Internet phone providers were ordered Thursday to begin supplying reliable 911 emergency call service after regulators heard an anguished Florida woman describe how she was unable to summon help to save her dying infant daughter.

The Federal Communications Commission gave companies 120 days to certify that their customers will be able to reach an emergency dispatcher when they call 911. Also, dispatchers must be able to tell where callers are located and the numbers from which they are calling.

Her voice breaking, Cheryl Waller of Deltona, Fla., told the commissioners before their vote that “120 days is seven days longer than my daughter lived.” Julia Waller “died at 113 days old because I can’t reach an operator,” she said.

Waller said she got a recording when she used her Internet phone to call 911 after her daughter stopped breathing last March. By the time she was able to summon help with a neighbor’s phone, the child was dead.

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who began a push for the 911 rules soon after taking over the agency in March, said such situations are “simply unacceptable.”

“Anyone who dials 911 has a reasonable expectation that he or she will be connected to an emergency operator,” Martin said.

Internet phone service, known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, shifts calls from wires and switches, using computers and broadband connections to convert sounds into data and transmit them via the Internet.

In many cases, subscribers use conventional phones hooked up to high-speed Internet lines.

But unlike traditional phones, which have a fixed address that a 911 operator can quickly call up, Internet phone service can be mobile. Someone with a laptop who signs up for service in Arizona, for example, may end up calling 911 for an emergency while on a trip to Boston.

Roughly half the nation’s estimated 1.5 million VoIP users are served by cable television companies that already provide full-blown 911 capabilities because they only offer phone service to a fixed location.

The FCC’s order requires companies that allow customers to use their Internet phones anywhere there is an Internet connection to provide the same emergency capability.

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