Emergency Responder Supporting the US, But Located in the UK

[MICHAEL BAILEY]

Hi,

I have a customer who has two CUCM clusters, one in the US and one in the UK, who wants to consolidate them into a single UK based cluster. He is aware of the signalling, call set-up latency etc. associated with this design model.

He wants to deploy Emergency Responder to support his US sites.

Based on the design guidelines and network latency ER will have to reside in the UK along with the rest of the UC applications.

Is this a supported configuration?

Does deploying ER in the UK across an MPLS WAN this breach any US regulations?

Many thanks,

Mike. 

[Chris Deren]

Yes, server can be located anywhere as it does not matter where it is hosted.

HTH,

Chris

[MICHAEL BAILEY]

Thanks Chris.

[brian.carlson]

As far as the regulations I think it depends on the state. For example our cluster is in Texas and I have to provide the floor with our CER. If your MPLS circuit fails you would probably fail over to the local gateway running CME and a pots line for emergency dialing that would be a local number for that campus or site. If it is only a small office I think it is ok but if you have a bunch of floors you would be breaking the regulation here in Texas. I found this online by doing E911 regulation search:

Texas - Texas Statute, Chapter 771.060; BUSINESS PROVIDING RESIDENTIAL TELEPHONE SWITCHES. A business service user that provides residential facilities and owns or leases a private telephone switch used to provide telephone service to facility residents shall provide to those residential end users the same level of 911 service that a service supplier is providing to other residential end users. Tarrant County Emergency Communication District has its own specific regulations for E911; Businesses using a publicly or privately owned telephone switch must be able to provide an accurate physical location and phone number for each 911 call. For businesses, location information must be minimally specified to the floor.

Hope this answers the second part of your question.

Thanks,

Brian Carlson

[Chris Deren]

There is no state regulation telling you where the server is to be hosted, which is what the question was about.

Chris

[will.alvord]

This wasn't asked, but thought I'd share.

From the SRND:

Cisco ER must send SNMP requests to the managed switches, and WAN delays can lead to SNMP timeouts and increase the time needed to track phone and switch changes. You might need to tune the SNMP parameters. See the “Configuring the SNMP Connection” section on page 4-43 for more information.

Which may or may not be what you meant by being "aware of the signaling". 

More importanly is that you're integrating multiple UCM clusters into a single ER cluster.  Disregard if you're aware of this, but I've been bitten by this so again...just thought I'd share.  There are strict jtapi versioning requirements with ER so you'll either need a separate ER server group per cluster or maintain both UCM clusters at the exact same version.  I'd rather risk offending you by telling you something you already know than have you get a mid-project surprise like that.

cheers,

will

aware of the signalling

aware of the signalling

[MICHAEL BAILEY]

Thanks Will,

It wasn't quite what I meant about signalling delays but I know now, so I'll take this into account

Cheers,

Mike.

[MICHAEL BAILEY]

Thanks Brian,

We're a UK based outfit so will engage a US based partner to deal with the ER configuration, so hopefull they'll be aware of the regulations applying to each of the states in which the cusoitnner has a site.

Cheers,

Mike.