Dial pattern to sub 911 for 999

FreePBX Configuration
1

Unfortunately, this is in the realm of 911 so I don’t want to monkey around and dial something by mistake. And my test system is down right now (had to disassemble my bench, as my wife said it needs to be a bedroom for the grandkids for the next few days). So … research.

I have a working sysem. The first block on my outbound routs is for Emergency, and transforms all the emergency variations correctly.
911 → 911
988 → 988
9-911 → 911
1-911 → 911
9-1-911 → 911

Why someone would dial a 1 in there I dunno, but …

Now a senior person says “we have a lot of folks of British origin here… what if one of them, in a panic, dials 999 instead of 911? We should be able to handle this.” Sigh.

OK, The full match pattern is the Prefix plus the pattern string, so maybe I could put 999 in the prefix, and nothing in the pattern. And put 911 in the prepend. In theory, “999 and nothing” would get matched, the 999 would get stripped, and “911 and nothing” would get sent to the trunk.

Do I have this figured out right?

I’d probably test this by putting my cellphone number in the Prepend, 999 in the Prefix, nothing in the pattern string, and see if my cellphone rings. Or if FreePBX chokes.

Or am I approaching this incorrectly?

2

We do this for a requirement to dial 112 instead of 999 in the UK. Create ring group 999 to 911# with a 300 second ring time. Failover destination: terminate call and hang up. You don’t need to make it any more complicated than that. Name the ring group something like 999 DIVERT TO 911 (DO NOT DELETE!!!). Make sure 911 is in your first outbound route and able to dial without a prefix.

3

The outbound route pattern is as you say. Put the entire dial string in prefix, add the actual number in prepend and leave the next field empty.

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4

That would be illegal in the US. 911 calls must be a straight shot through.

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5

Fair enough, but it’s 999 he’s configuring here not 911?

6

Yes and no. It’s in the US so they must have 911 with no prefixes and nothing can be in between the caller and the route to the PSTN from the PBX. This would essentially route the call back through the PBX and since we also have to comply with dispatchable location, that could interfere with setting the proper details for the call. It seems a boss is worried that some of the Brit’s working in the office might dial 999 instead of 911.

That is correct. 999 in the prefix which will be stripped, 911 in the prepend which will be added.

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7

Does this mean that one cannot redirect them through - for example - a ring group? I would support that.

But if one cannot apply a dial pattern, then the call isn’t getting through (for example, someone dials 9-911 then nothing happens), and that seems rather self-defeating.

8

We are now about 5-6 years into Kari’s Law and Ray Baum’s Act compliance. At this point, the whole “how can I flub this” is past.

The biggest rule is that users must be able to dial 911 unencumbered. I.e. no 9 prefix, no pressing something to pick up the line, no dial a code then get to 911. Doing 9911, 999 to translate to 911 really isn’t supposed to happen because you’re manipulating digits but at this point you’re not messing with the routing (Ring group).

Another big rule is that the 911 must be uninterrupted in its path. The user dials 911 and it goes straight to the PSAP destination. It cannot be sent to a conference bridge and other channels brought in, it cannot be sent to other routing through the phone system before getting to the PSAP route. It needs to be a straight shot out. Putting this through the ring group means that 911 needs to be treated as a “forward to PSTN” call and if that screws up its on you, but it also means you’ve manipulated the routing.

On top of all that, you need to have to alerts and notifications setup in the system. Now you’ve complied with Kari’s Law. Let’s not forget that a 6yo kid named Kari watched her mom get murdered because of a hotel’s prefixes and/or poor 911 routing. Kari dialled 911 multiple times for it to never work.

The next step is to comply with Ray Baum’s Act which dictates that you must provide exact dispatchable location details. If the phone on floor 2 room 202 makes a 911 call, you need to make sure that calls presents an address that contains FL 2 RM 202 as the Address_2 line. There are various compliances for this depending on the size of the building(s), how many floors, how many ingress/egress into the building, how many offices/rooms or sections.

So a single floor small office building with one ingress but 3 offices off the main room, this counts as a single location. There’s one way in and everything is right there for the EMTs to access. Now you take that same setup and double the size of the building. Some of the offices are down hallways and there’s three ingresses to the building. Now you need to start identifying the rooms and locations since EMT could come in any of those three ingresses and they need to find what the location.

I do a lot of hotels and I went from having a single 911 registered location at a hotel to 200-400+ because of how many floors and rooms.

Now just keep in mind that no matter what happens, you are the PBX admin and by law you are responsible for proper 911 compliance. If something was to happen and someone died or things went bad for people in an emergency because 911 didn’t work or it didn’t have proper registration and call ends up a the wrong PSAP adding additional response time…you are legally on the hook for the failures.

So take from this what you will and decide how much worth cutting corners is to you down the road.

9

We are not talking about dialling 911, in the USA, We are talking about how to ensure that numbers people may mistakenly call instead of 911 can result in a call to 911, rather than a rejection.

In practice, I think people in the UK have seen enough US TV and film that they are very familiar with 911. Conversely, most people will have dialled 999 at most a single digit number of times, so it won’t be ingrained in their muscle memory. As such I think the manager is probably over thinking the risk assessment that led to the original requirement.

There are some suggestions that 911 will work with mobile phones, because so many people, including children, have learnt it from TV, and mobiles don’t have to deal with the old, step by step, local dialling codes, which often started from 9, on satellite exchanges.

10

Sure and that can be done in the digit manipulation in the outbound route patterns. Making it so 999 dials 911 via a Ring Group or Follow Me immediately puts a layer of call routing between dialing 911 and the PSAP. That’s not allowed in the US.

999 should to map to 911 and go out the trunk to the PSTN with no other routing in between.

11

Everyone please note - the first Dial Pattern is 911 → 911. If someone dials 911, it goes directly out. No manipulation of digits. No routing through other modules. No nada nothing - just connecting straight out the Route.

Everything else is capturing mis-dials, and ensuring that the intent of the caller is fulfilled. Dialed 9-911 because your work is still on an old analog system, and you didn’t read the manual for this location? No problem, we know what you want. Etc.

I’m also in Canada. I don’t need to follow USA laws. But these laws do set a great standard, and a best practice, for configuration.

I am going to move 988 out of my emergency group - I do need to connect that caller with the outside world, I do not need to trigger notifications in the same manner that I would for a 911 call.

12

Technically, they didn’t dial 911.

Not that I’d want to be the test case for this, though.

13

Technically they were told by the boss and the PBX admin 999 is for emergency calls which they facilitated.

So if dialing 999 went busy because there is no routing for it. Legally, they didn’t dial an emergency number so expectation of emergency services wasn’t there. The moment that expectation has been given by the admin of the system…the story changes.

I don’t know why people brush off this stuff then follow it up with “but I wouldn’t try it”.

14

Thanks for continuing to lead a lot of thoughts and discussions into this topic @BlazeStudios :cowboy_hat_face: it often gets one thinking about new ideas.

Didn’t RBA’s last set of mandates go in to effect in '22 ?

There’s clearly still a gap - eg. when the FCC Chair says, in March of this year:

“…phone providers rarely deliver dispatchable location information like a street address or the caller’s apartment or room number, despite the FCC’s rules saying that information should be provided when technically feasible.”

^^^ Going to include that quote in my related talk next week at FreePBX World Summit 2025! Hope you can make it!

Hmm… straight… a bit like soon…

Quite literally - although most likely not what you meant - the sort of direct-peering approach, while a cool idea, might fall under hypothetical NG911 territory :thinking: and ultimately gets back closer to the decentralized, local approach to emergency response as originally envisioned 50+ years ago on the POTS (or on Batman :bat: :full_moon:).

But we aren’t (back) there yet!

You might consider that what actually happens a lot nowadays is not straight but more of a zig-zag:

The user dials 911 and it goes out the PBX to the SIP provider located half-way across the planet back to the PSAP destination across the street.

Therefore, it might be somewhat reasonable – depending on one’s particular environment – to add a few extra milliseconds in your dial plan by doing things that potentially increase resiliency and robustness, such as adding graceful fail-overs involving:

…or something else like the official FreePBX docs offer regarding notifications, or other ideas, especially if your organization includes dedicated connections to security teams that don’t need you to repeat your location three or four times but instead can deliver immediate assistance in seconds across multiple dimensions eg. both physical and phone-based, custom-tailored to your risk levels.

However, IANAL and it depends on your assessments of the trade-offs, especially in light of carrier failures, overburdened PSAPs putting callers on hold, liability, safe work environment requirements, etc. Point being that there’s a lot more factors to consider in parallel with the “straight shot through” argument because there’s always something potentially in the way. Robust solutions should plan around these roadblocks – not merely seek to meet the minimal compliance requirements.

15

I’m talking about the programming of the MLTS (PBX) that needs to be followed by the requirements. You’re bringing in a level that has nothing to do with this subject.