With Kari’s law now going into effect, does the CallerID that is sent on a 911 call have to be a number that the emergency operator has to be able to call back and reach the phone the call was made from?
If that is the case I would have to get a DID and E911 for every phone in our organization, which would be very expensive and impractical.
We do have our system notify our security dept on every 911 call with exact location and number of the phone and they rush to the caller immediately.
The emergency callerID that we send on 911 calls is our main company number that goes to an IVR if you call it.
The number presented just has to be located in the right geographical physical location the call was made from as far as I know, but only as practically as is possible, while also allowing for a number registered to the HQ that could be somewhere else entirely, but I would also appreciate more guidance if I’m wrong! We show a geographically accurate DID for those routes to avoid any E911 issues in any case. The FreePBX GUI caters for that in Extension settings.
If you have a large organization but all under one roof I would recommend having a DID that shows the address but can call back to the security office or reception desk if you are not able to have one for each phone. You could also consider doing one for each zone of the building and have it ring a designated person in the area.
From my understanding the law really only states that you must be able to dial 911 without any leading digits, such as an additional 9, and that the phone system must notify a front desk or security office when 911 is called to alert someone on site that there is an emergency.
I always make sure that 911 and 9911 can be dialed. FreePBX does not have a way out of the box to provide the notification. The only thing that is easily done would be to get the PagePro module and it has some functionality that can create a page when 911 is called. To be honest, the notification piece in my opinion is a bit lacking in FreePBX.
Thanks @ BlazeStudios, I read your post in which you are saying: “must be able to dial 911 and be routed to the proper PSAP along with valid address and call back number.”
What does that mean, “call back number”, a DID directly to the phone or can it be to an IVR, with a step that takes you to an operator that you can talk to?
A call to 911 must provide a “dispatchable location” to the PSAP. The definition is vague: “the street address of the calling party, and additional information such as room number, floor number, or similar information necessary to adequately identify the location of the calling party.” Previous case law and FCC commentary has stated that a street address is adequate for a single-family home, even if it has multiple stories, and that a street address and suite number is sufficient for a small business, even if it has private offices. However, a hotel must identify the room number originating the call. You won’t get any legal advice in a public forum – ask your attorney about the requirements for your organization.
Whether it’s a legal requirement or not, IMO it’s not a good idea for a 911 callback to route to an IVR. The call to 911 should send a number that dynamically routes back to the originating extension, or simply rings your security department.
It is very useful for most phones to be directly reachable without going through an IVR. Unless your IVR has speech recognition, it’s unsafe to navigate it while driving, so having a DID per user could reduce the number of calls to 911
Incoming numbers need not be expensive. For example, SignalWire offers individual DIDs at $0.08/mo. + $0.00325/min. 911 addresses are $0.60/mo. each. Some providers such as bulkvs.com are even cheaper, though I don’t know enough about them to make a recommendation.
Get a DID for each building, set these DIDs as the emergency CID in each extension - you can use bulk handler to mass update. (Example: All extensions in building-A will use the emergency CID 2126665001, Building-B 2126665002, Building-C 2016665003 etc.)
Then, gave these DIDs routed on incoming calls to a Queue/Ring Group which the person who answers will be able to address the issue (assuming they already know 911 was called)
This way you can also add exact building/location details for each DID to the e911 system.
The only issue we do have, clients who have multiple locations and have users that use Hot Desking, then you need to write a custom dialplan which will change the CID based on IP.
Biggest thing I wanna see from the FreePBX team here is some kind of update to outbound routing code that is freely available to enable the notification or script or something be hooked easily within the GUI.
For us, we added E911 to our DID from Flowroute.com.
Now Flowroute.com and West.com are part of intrado.com, they seem to expand on their E911 solutions. They have a web portal to setup the E911 routing https://portal.911.west.com/users/sign_in though I did not use this option. I understand that others might have different needs than us and I shared the links hoping others might benefit from.
