In honor of National Public Safety Telecommunications Week, we wanted to share a valuable, possibly life saving tip with our readers. Although texting has become an increasingly popular form of communication, most 911 call centers are not able to receive text messages or respond to them, except for the center in Frederick, MD.
Frederick County’s 911 center has expanded their communication abilities to accept 911 texts from Verizon customers. The reason for this early adoption of receiving 911 texts? Frederick is the location of Maryland’s School for the Deaf main campus.
The Federal Communications Commission is working with the nation’s four largest wireless carriers; AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, to make texting 911 a valid way to communicate an emergency. The carriers signed an agreement to make emergency texting available to more than 90 percent of American cellphone users by May 15, 2014.
Next year or sooner, these carriers will relay text messages to text-enabled 911 call centers. The next step is getting the call centers up to speed to accept these texts.
A 911 call center in Iowa started accepting texts in 2009 and trials of 911 texting are going on in Vermont. In most other areas, texts sent to 911 are not received or responded to.
Before the text receiving ability is fully operational, the FCC has requested call centers to respond with “bounce back” messages so people who text 911 in areas where the service isn’t ready to accept text will know their text didn’t go through. The bounce message will instruct texters to make a voice call to 911. The plan is for the bounce back message to be implemented nationwide by June 30th of this year.
While 911 call centers generally prefer being called, so they can ask questions, etc., texting is an important feature for users who are speech or hearing impaired or in a situation where the caller needs to remain quiet for safety reasons, as in the case of a home invasion or workplace attack.
The FCC has wanted a 911 texting system for quite some time and referenced the shooting at Virginia Tech. Several students sent text messages during the crisis that were never received. 33 people were killed in that attack.
If you’d like more information on how to integrate cell phones into your communications system, call Teltek today! The Avaya and NEC phone systems we sell, install and support work well with mobile technology.
Teltek is a Certified Avaya Business Partner, NEC Dealer, and Microsoft Partner with three locations in the Baltimore and DC Metropolitan areas. We specialize in providing one call technology support for small to mid-sized businesses and nonprofits in Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia and Pennsylvania.