After the accident that I got into last week I dialed 911. I got a busy signal so I hung up and dialed again. Once again busy. This went on for 10-15 minutes. Finally I got through and talked with the dispatcher who took a brief statement then put me on hold. I then had to repeat the entire conversation over again.
After doing some research I found that when you dial 911 from a cell phone (in California) it goes to the California highway patrol. From them they then route it to a 911 operator.
From what I am told this is because they cannot track cell phones so they route it to the CHP first to avoid unnecessary calls.
What if I was seriously injured? What if it was an entirely different situation that was dependant on the response time of the police?
This really worries me as I do not have a land line. My wife and I both have cell phones and get perfect reception so a lane line is an unnecessary expense.
With the amount of cell phone usage in this day and age what are they doing about this?
I’m not sure it would work any better, but perhaps you could try dialing the regular operator (does dialing zero work on cell phones?) and ask them to connect you directly to 911, rather than CHP.
Yes, but do tell the O-operator what town’s 911 you need.
No, it’s to prevent sending the call to the wrong 911 center which would guarantee delay.
Land-line 911 service is designed to tie to a database and pass your address on to the right 911 dispatcher, without you saying a word. They can do this because a land line is hard-wired (that’s right) at the telco’s Central Office.
They (the Feds, mobile companies, and telcos) are working on designing a system to track cell phones so they can route the calls to the nearest 911 dispatch center with some sort of location info, although it’s hard to see they could pin you down very closely–to the nearest cell tower, sure, but the address???
As to the 15-minutes of busies, either equipment was down :eek: or there was a rush of calls to the Highway Patrol 911 center at the time. What to do about that? E-mail your state legislative rep and Gov. Schwarzenegger, that obviously the CHP’s resources were insufficient to handle the load at that time, and that’s one of the things that you as a taxpayer want to fund. That is, if you do want to do that.
All new cell phones ship with something called aGPS which is assisted GPS. The phone has a GPS receiver and sends the data to towers to be triangulated. When you call 911 you theoretically send your coordinates as well. I think the towers route 911 calls differently, so each tower knows what’s the nearest call center anyway and can route you to the nearest 911 center, be it CHP or whatever.
That’s not universal yet, though. People would be unwise to make a Hollywood-style call and say “Send an ambulance! Now!” Click they hangup. :rolleyes:
If you are within range of three cell towers, they can use differential time of arrival of your signal at those locations to get pretty close. If you are within range of two, they can put you on a hyperbola, that may intersect, say a freeway, at only one point…so if you tell the operator you are on I-80 and being chased by a maniac, they theoretically could figure out where you are even if you don’t know exactly, but can give them some clue.
There was a lot of effort in this direction before GPS reciever technology became cheap and compact enough to put one in each handset.
I’ve followed this, as back in the 80’s I was at the scene of a hang-gliding accident. The area had a grid layed out for anticipated development, but there were no street signs.
One of the guys did have a cell phone (they were rare then) and we called for an ambulance, but we had to send a vehicle (me!) to meet/lead them at an intersection a few
miles away, because that was the nearest place we could discribe exactly.
When I got back with ambulance, a helicopter was already there…which is what we had asked for in the first place… we had a FAA sectional and could give a VOR intersection.
Plus we were in an open area with probably 30 hang gliders set up, so we were easy to spot from the air.
Yes, “0” works on cell phones (I got a lot of calls from cell phones, usually mistakenly.) You will probably reach the landline operator for the tower that you’re calling from. Since this tower may or may not be near you, you definitely need to tell the operator which city serves the area that you are in. (The operator is very likely not from your area, so you will need to know!) Our instructions, IIRC, were to connect to highway patrol for cell phones, since people calling from cell phones are often in vehicles and may not know which city serves the area they are in. However, in an emergency, if I were getting a busy signal from the highway patrol, I would certainly be trying other numbers in order to get the customer the help necessary. I definitely would not have left a customer in an emergency without getting through to some sort of help.
They really don’t need the actual address to be able to route the call to the correct city or county police commnication center. And that’s what they are trying to do. They still depend mainly on you to tell them where you are and what the problem is.
Land lines do have the advantage of providing the actual address to a dispatcher, but they still confirm this when talking to the person.
If a cell phone system can just identify the tower and route the call to the nearest police station, that’s good enough.