Nationwide Text to 9-1-1 Solution Announced

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) today announced release of J-STD-110, a standard that, upon implementation, will provide short message service (SMS) subscribers the ability to send an SMS text message to 911 to be received at a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). This industry-generated solution positions service providers to have a fully operational text to 911 solution in place by May 15, 2014, the target date communicated to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by the nation's major wireless network operators.

In addition to defining standard interfaces from the originating network to the PSAP, the standard addresses needs unique to 911 communications such obtaining coarse location for routing to the appropriate PSAP, handling bounce-back messages (e.g. the wireless network or PSAP cannot accept text messages), and managing the text message dialog between the originator and PSAP.

Two interesting points to note: 1) this standard applies only to SMS messaging, not third party messaging formats utilized on many smart phones which are not standards based; 2) this is intended to be an interim solution only while the long-term Next Generation 911 solution is being developed in ATIS and 3GPP for Multimedia Messaging Emergency Services.

Please contact TuWay Communications for additional information.