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Contact NICE: Customer hotline: (888) 217-0593 Customer support: (800) 642-3611 (800) NICE 611 email: Welcome@nice.com On the web: www.nice.com |
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NICE Systems, Inc. 950 Herndon Parkway Suite 250 Herndon, VA 20170 |
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| VOIP IN 9-1-1: IMPLICATIONS FOR RECORDING AND INTERACTION ANALYSIS |
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Who would ever have thought back in 1968, when the first 9-1-1 call was placed - that three small numbers would come to have such big meaning in our lives? Today, 9-1-1 is equated with the expectation that emergency assistance is no more than a phone call away. That trust in 9-1-1 is affirmed over 200 million times a year, with each 9-1-1 call. But four decades after that first landmark 9-1-1 call, some consumers are awakening to the fact that the very 9-1-1 services they take for granted might not be there when their call for help is placed through a VoIP phone. Thanks to a 9-1-1 system forty years in the making, 9-1-1 calls from wireline phones are automatically delivered to the right PSAP, along with the caller's ANI (call-back number) and ALI (location information) - essential information that PSAPs need to provide life-saving assistance. The scenario can be vastly different for VoIP phone service users. If they get through at all, their 9-1-1 calls can get routed to administrative lines, or worse still to the wrong location (PSAP) without their ANI or ALI. Portable VoIP phone service presents an even bigger challenge - similar to wireless 9-1-1 - because there's no such thing as a fixed location (ALI) when you can take your phone service on the road. The lack of E9-1-1 (Enhanced 9-1-1) service for VoIP phone users is no small problem. By one estimate, about one third of the 2.5 million residential VoIP customers in the U.S. do not have E9-1-1 service. With the number of U.S. VoIP consumers expected to grow to about 9 million by 2008, the gap could potentially widen even further. Meanwhile, VoIP calls to 9-1-1, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands in 2004, are expected to reach 3.5 million in 2006. Lacking the proper E9-1-1 service, that would be 3.5 million opportunities for something tragic to happen. This issue received national attention in 2005 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that interconnected VoIP providers must provide E9-1-1 service to their customers, ensuring that 9-1-1 calls get routed to the proper location, along with the callers' ANI and ALI. The timeline for VoIP providers to comply with that mandate - November 28, 2005 - has come and gone. Full compliance was not achieved, but with a number of public safety organizations and industry coalitions taking up the mantle of this very important cause, and the U.S. Senate and Congress taking up new legislation to build on the FCC order, it's not a question of if - but when - E9-1-1 VoIP services will become the norm. Recording and interaction analysis in a VoIP world PSAPs recognized the importance of capturing their 9-1-1 communications decades ago, before the words "wireless" or "VoIP" were even part of our vocabulary. How will these new IP-based interactions be captured? The answer is - at least for the foreseeable future - not much differently than they're being captured today. Though there is widespread consumer adoption of VoIP phone service, the world of public safety is still very much dominated by traditional circuit switched technology. Today, a 9-1-1 call that originates as VoIP needs to be converted to TDM to traverse a Wireline E9-1-1 network to arrive at its final destination point, the local PSAP. Until PSAPs adopt VoIP as a core technology on the receiving end (e.g. in the PSAP), 9-1-1 VoIP calls will be recorded in much the same way as wireline calls are recorded today. There is one notable point of difference, though - and that lies in the data that comes along with the call. Today, for 9-1-1 calls placed on traditional wireline phones, the process is well-established and supported by a funding mechanism and a legacy infrastructure of dedicated trunk lines, selective routers and well-maintained and verified databases. The callers' ANI and ALI always travel along with the voice call and as such, can be captured by the recording system. Historically, capturing this data has given PSAPs enhanced capabilities to research incidents involving 9-1-1 recordings. The process by which the caller's ANI and ALI are captured and provided in the VoIP realm is yet to be firmly established. While the FCC's ruling requires providers of interconnected VoIP phone service to provide E9-1-1 as a standard offering to their customers, it does not dictate specifically how they are to do it. Lots of different ideas have been placed on the table, ranging from the least sophisticated and most manual methods (e.g. requiring the user to input and update their own location information) to the more complex (e.g. GPS-based solutions that pinpoint the location of the caller in terms of longitude, latitude and altitude). Standards are just now emerging. Just this month, NENA published its Interim/Migratory (I2) Standard which proposes an interim VoIP architecture for Enhanced 9-1-1 services. Inevitably, the near-term stop-gap solution will leverage some of the existing E9-1-1 infrastructure but will also require some new infrastructure, processes, databases, and funding mechanisms. You might ask 'What's the impact on recording?' As new solutions for E9-1-1 emerge for both fixed and nomadic VoIP, you'll want to ensure your contact center is equipped with a solution that can capture both the voice and associated data (e.g. the ANI, and the ALI whether in address form, or as a longitude, latitude and altitude). NICE Systems has significant experience developing integrated recording solutions for 9-1-1, on both the traditional telephony side, and in the wireless arena (where the location information is derived from GPS-based information). VoIP in 9-1-1: looking forward Internet telephony is enjoying huge success with consumers, and increasingly, with commercial enterprises that are switching from traditional circuit switched PBXs to IP-based telephony. VoIP offers many benefits, not the least of which are: lower TCO (total cost of ownership), reduced infrastructure and hardware costs, easier administration and management, reduced phone costs, integration of voice and data (paving the way for multi-media communications), and the ability to support an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. These benefits are especially attractive to the small and mid-sized business market, as well as outsourced call center operations, and large, distributed contact centers. But what about 9-1-1? The jury is still out on exactly when PSAPs will embrace VoIP as a core technology in any widespread way, although it's clear that the technology, in spite of some shortcomings, holds much future promise. Currently, agencies are taking baby steps in deploying the technology - for example, selectively using VoIP for administrative lines. The verdict: the fully IP-enabled PSAP appears to be a thing of the future. Why? VoIP as a core technology does not yet meet the stringent requirements and expectations of 9-1-1. PSAPs are mainly inbound call-taking operations so there is little to be saved in phone costs. What can be gained from the implementation of VoIP today needs to be weighed against increased security requirements and other inherent issues that could compromise the 9-1-1 mission. For example, voice communications in VoIP travel in packets over a shared line. Spikes in call volume could compromise communications. Also, VoIP is optimized for human speech but not non-human sounds, which call-takers need to discern to dispatch appropriate assistance. Then, there's the ever-present question of how new technology would be funded. Still, although sweeping adoption of VoIP in 9-1-1 is not imminent, the more pressing issue of how to handle an onslaught of VoIP 9-1-1 calls has opened up a larger discussion surrounding the technology - more specifically, about the long-term benefits of creating next-generation E9-1-1 systems based on VoIP. PSAPs could consolidate divergent networks for telephony, radio and CAD onto a single IP-based network that transmits both voice and data, and offers lower equipment and installation costs, less wiring, and cost savings. Moreover, as radio system, telephony and CAD manufacturers move toward IP-based platforms, a common standard facilitates greater interoperability and opens up the possibility of accessing all three applications through a common interface. Perhaps more importantly, IP telephony would open up new modes of communication between citizens and 9-1-1 centers. The 9-1-1 call of the future might not be a 9-1-1 call at all - it could be a text message, or voice accompanied by a still picture or video image taken on a cell phone. With the advanced routing capabilities of the IP network, the text, voice and video information could be seamlessly routed to a secondary PSAP or other remote site for handling, perhaps even transmitted directly to a first responder in the field. Key considerations in selecting a solution for capturing VoIP interactions Whether your PSAP is on the cutting edge of VoIP, just testing the waters, or sitting on the sidelines - when it comes to selecting a recording solution, there are things you can do today to prepare for VoIP's inevitable arrival in your 9-1-1 center.
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