Cisco Emergency Responder (CER) handling of softphones, mobile phones, and Cisco Unified Client Services Framework devices

[2020]

I've been trying to research this question I'm curious about but I am having no success on it.  I was wondering what is Cisco's take on CER assigning ERLs on mobile devices and softphones?  If end users have the jabber app on their work iphone/android that they take home with them, how does one handle this situation in CER?  How about a soft phone on someones laptop?  Would you keep it unallocated? Assign it to a Cisco ER group?  What would happen if a user used it off that device to call 911?  I don't think anyone has really touched on this before and I'm a little curious since US law requires that enterprises to have location services. 

[Adam Pawlowski]

There is a lot of discussion on this topic, just not as much here as this is a general telephony issue, which each enterprise may choose to approach in their own way (or ignore).

Let me try and unpack a bit. While ER's documentation often seems to leave some room for clarity, they're pretty clear on outlining the application's capabilities, limitations, and how it can be used. As is stated, Jabber is supported for manual location (wired)/subnet and wireless location only. Apply that information to meet your requirements.

If the customer is off premise with Jabber you don't handle it with CER. Mobile clients can be configured to place a 911 call from the phone instead of the Jabber application. If you configure Jabber manually, and trigger ER then the wrong location details will likely be conveyed.

The above is no different than a softphone on a laptop, other than you can potentially use wireless location data. If you don't have Cisco WLCs then it is annoying to configure and manage all the BSSIDs.

You do not have a choice to assign a phone to the ER, unless you use subnet definitions to ignore the device.

It will do exactly what it is supposed to do if you call 911 from it, it will represent the call with the default URL if it is not located in some other way.

[Adam Pawlowski]

Since there is such a gap, if your organization is deploying Jabber softphones and has a requirement to convey the caller's location in some manner while roaming, then unfortunately you will have to look at 3rd party solutions.

[2020]

Thank you Adam for the response and the time you took to reply.  Yeah I was just wondering about it so I will have to figure out how configure the mobile phones to use their own 911 and not the CER route.  No matter what I think it is important to have a plan on how to deal with this.  I will research a little more and put information here on what I find so if anyone else has the issue in the future they can look into it.  

[Adam Pawlowski · Accepted solution]

Sure



It's an interesting topic. Many people want to do the right thing, but, sometimes that's doing nothing and not making the situation worse. Others accept the risk of leaving it be as it does. Sometimes it is too expensive.



In general it appears that most orgs deploying mobile soft phone are not implementing much in the way of 911 solutions, but, I would believe with the regulations coming into play soon for the US that you'll see some more robust options becoming available.



The Jabber configuration for the TCT/BOT in the UCM allows you to define the emergency number. You can test this operation by putting some other number there and making a test call for it.