It's not just new network infrastructure that existing and upcoming wireless carriers need to worry about this year: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has mandated that all wireless carriers need to offer location-based 911 services by February 2010.

According to several reports, however, many carriers are struggling to meet the deadline. It's certainly more essential than network upgrades, however: a major number of 911 emergency calls are made via cell phones, and it's important that first responders are able to determine a person's location using this technology. It might be easy to utilize towers to determine someone's longitude and latitude, but it won't supply an exact address as you'd find with landlines. What's more, what happens in areas where towers are few and far between?

In turn, and a significant part of the hold-up, is the issues of call centres that receive the emergency calls and dispatch the first responders. These need to be well equipped to pinpoint the location of a person who's calling from his cell phone, and be able to do so quickly, easily, and accurately.

Bernard Lord, head of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), muses that the situation is not at all like we'd see in the movies, and cautions that it will be a "significant challenge to deploy this countrywide for next February".

The service can also raise privacy issues: can the ability to find someone's whereabouts be abused for the wrong reasons? Will the system be easy to tap into from outside sources? Security is clearly of utmost importance as well.

Given the significant financial investment, along with the time and effort it will take to implement this new 911 service, cell phone users can expect to see an increase in the 911 fee already charged on their monthly contracts.

[Photo: www.freedigitalphotos.net]

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