How do you avoid mistaken 911 calls when 9 is used to get an outside line.

[Bryana012]

We use 9 for dialing an outside line and are getting too many accidental dialings of 911.  How have you mitigated this issue?

[Deepak Rawat]

Refer to below threads:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/9808231/911-misdial-handling

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/10851776/911-misdial-issues

Regards

Deepak

[Bryana012]

Thank you the first link had some interesting ideas.  I like the idea of sending 911 calls to a call handler to play a greeting of "you just dialed 911, if this is an emergency stay on the line".  Now I will see if my security guy likes the idea.

[Chris Deren]

I would be very careful with that due to legal implications.  It all comes down to what US state (assuming US) you have locations on as some of them specificaly call out not doing this. May want to check with your legal team not just security.

[Bryana012]

Chris,

Thank you as well, caution is always a good thing.  I do appreciate your input.

[Chris Deren]

Short of implementing interdigit timeout when dialing 911 there is no much you can do, here is what it typically done for this:

• change off-net access to something other than 9
• Allow only 9911 dialing and put stickers on the phones
• introduce inter-digit dialing when dialing 911 to give users time to realize their mistake, this may have legal implications

[Bryana012]

Chris,

I do appreciate the response.  I do have one question though, and I do understand you are probably not an attorney, how would routing 911 through a call handler and then allowing it to go out 9911 be different from not allowing 911 and only allowing 9911, as you suggested above?  The one caveat that was not specifically stated, that may or may not make a difference, is our system is setup to allow both 911 and 9911, which if we set a call handler to divert 911 would not change, 9911 would still be an option.

We have reduced inter-digit dialing time out to try to reduce the number of 911 calls made in error.

[Chris Deren]

I guess it depends what the call handler does, does it play some kind of a message and then forwards the call? If so, put yourself in emergency situation and you dial 911 to find out you get connected to some greeting, you freak out and disconnect, try couple more times and something unfortunate happens. Pretty easy case for lawyer to sue your organization for negligence, though again I am not a lawyer and when it comes to one offs like these I redirect customers to their legal team.