911 best practices

[joel]

I usually create 911 pattern and also the 9.911 pattern.

Is there a regulation that we need to follow to create these patterns for 911.

Any links could help. Thanks!!!

Joel Paulraj

CCVP, CIPTDS, CIPCCES

Systems Engineer

NetAge, Inc.

[tbramwe]

Joel:

Not a regulation for the route patten as much as a regulation for call routing and the adherence to 911 vs. E911.

Most states in the USA have adopted or are in the process of establishing E911 regulations for compliance of existing and new PBX (and VoIP) systems. Please see the attached link for information by state on 911/E911.

http://www.nasna911.org/links.htm

Also, the National Emergency Number Association may be a useful resource.

http://www.nena9-1-1.org/pages/ContentList.asp?CTID=21

Proper PSAP notification and address verification through the service provider of your trunk circuits is very important, esp. if you are serving other sites with trunking at the host cluster.

Hope that helps out.

Tom

[thisisshanky]

I dont think either that there is a regulation to have both in the system. But,

When people panic during an emergency, they will probably not realise that they need to dial a 9 before 911 to dial out. So its better to put both patterns in there. Also think about the situation where a guest is in the building, he/she probably doesnt know about trunk access codes to dial out during emergency. The downside of putting 911 pattern is that you may run into false calls to 911. People dialing a long distance number, may accidentally dial 91 + 1 (instead of 2-9). They realize that they have accidentally dialed 911 and panic and then they hang up. If you can educate your users to not to hangup the call, but instead talk to the 911 rep and tell them that it was a false alarm, you may not end up having a lot of these problems with the 911 pattern. Cops wont show up every day, and you wont have to pay $500 for false alarm call. Of course you could work around all this by keeping the 911 pattern and creating an overlapping pattern (Translation pattern) which causes 911 calls to be delayed (rather than immediately being routed), so that users do get some time to realize that they made a mistake and hang up the call before it reaches the 911 call center.

HTH

Sankar.

PS: please remember to rate posts!

[muhammadt]

What do you mean here "Of course you could work around all this by keeping the 911 pattern and creating an overlapping pattern (Translation pattern) which causes 911 calls to be delayed (rather than immediately being routed), so that users do get some time to realize that they made a mistake and hang up the call before it reaches the 911 call center."

How would you implement this? I have a similar issue with a customer. The are using ER and 911 calls are being translated to 811 which go to ER (in translation pattern). 911 calls work but again, users are dialing by mistake. Customer would like a way to error a call if the call is 911X. Can this be done.

[dhingst]

I've got about 700 phones in one building and using a pattern of '911' I was getting 2-4 false calls a month. Needless to say the fire and police depts were getting a bit annoyed as was our security staff and internal emergency responders. (We use Emergency Responder to notify appropriate people in the building of 911 calls.)

I finally had to change the pattern to only allow '9911' and now I get only about one or two false alarms a year.

I was very against taking away '911' because I feel in a real emergency that is what people will naturally want to dial. (To my surprise I had to call 911 from my home and found myself dialing 9911 twice and wondering why it didn't work before the lightbulb went off and I dialed 911.) We educate everyone on what to dial when they are hired and by putting stickers on the phones.

One suggestion I had is to send 911 calls to our security desk which is manned 24 hours. I won't advertise this to our users but it should catch the accidental calls. 9911 would still be sent straight out to 911. The other option was to route 911 to Unity or ICD and ask the users if they are sure they want 911 giving them a chance to hang up before the call goes through. (Make an announcement, wait 5 seconds or so then put the call through automatically in case the person can't "Press 1 to actually call 911") I like that idea and may try it.

[muhammadt]

Right now we made it work...halfway. I configured the 911X translation pattern to call reject. I then configured the 811 CTI Route point, with a 911 second line that CFWDall to 811. This 811 is the CTI RP that forwards over to ER. Both go to the PSAP, but only 811 notifies folks via Emergency responder. 911 calls the PSAP, but no ER notifications go out. I think this has somethign to do with the way the info is forwarded to EResponder.

If a user dials 911[0-9] it will give them an error message, which works great. But ER ruined it for me. Just dialing 911 has a inter-digit timeout of 15 seconds, which can be changed.

[jlzfeeney]

Hey guys, as simplistic as this may seem, but my customers get an option for trunk codes. At our office we had the same issue, so, our trunk access code is now 8 versus 9.