Raymond Sims Baum (August 18, 1955 – February 9, 2018) was an American lawyer, lobbyist, and politician. His Wikipedia page notes:
Baum was born and raised in La Grande, Oregon. He studied at Brigham Young University and Willamette University College of Law. Baum was admitted to the Oregon bar in 1983 and practiced law in La Grande. Baum served in the Oregon House of Representatives in 1988. He was majority leader in the state house for the Republican Party starting in 1995 but did not seek reelection in 1996. In 2003 Ted Kulongoski appointed Baum a member of the Oregon Public Utility Commission. He served there until 2011, serving as chairman starting in 2010. Baum worked for the National Association of Broadcasters and served as vice-president of government affairs. He died at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland from prostate cancer.
In honor of his career, the Repack Airwaves Yielding Better Access for Users of Modern Services Act of 2018 or the RAY BAUM’S Act of 2018 was raised in his namesake as a testament to his service to the American people.
The RAY BAUM’s ACT has picked up many small provisions where those issues on their own didn’t warrant, or could not muster support for their cause in a separate bill. An item particularly intriguing within this act, is in Title IV, under Section 506. It states,
“The FCC must conclude a proceeding to consider adopting rules to ensure that dispatchable location is conveyed with 9-1-1 calls, including calls from multi-line telephone systems, regardless of the technological platform used. “Dispatchable location” means the street address of the calling party and additional information necessary to adequately identify the location of the calling party.”
While I am certainly NOT a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, I can most certainly read and write the English language. The first 10 words of Section 506 say it all; “The FCC must conclude a proceeding to consider adopting rules”. That’s right, they have to finish making up their mind about having to make up their mind, or in other words, Get Ready to Get Ready. That’s it, end of the story – period.
Once again, the legacy database providers (a.k.a. the providers about to lose large revenues from database management fees) are running around telling their clients that the sky is falling, and they need to be compliant with a dispatchable location, pawning that off as individual station level reporting to the PSAP. Why? This seeds their coffers with revenue but actually provides very little actionable information to 1st responders.
For the record, I am NOT against providing detail to those responding to an emergency. In fact, I am all for that practice. What I take issue with is forcing a consumer to provide detail that is useless, at great expense and hardship, only to create revenue for those who store the data for public safety. Most often my arguments are deflected with the response, “Any small level of detail can be helpful when trying to locate a person in an emergency, and seconds count!”
Yes, seconds DO count. That is my precise argument. Instead of providing great detail that isn’t actionable (an EMT has no idea where cubicle 2C-231 is located in my building) why are we not using technology to create intelligent displays in the lobby that actually SHOWS a responder where they are needed, and how to get there in the event there is no one on site to guide them? The legacy Automatic Location Identification (ALI) record used today to convey information to first responders) is a text-only record just over 500 characters in length. There are minimal fields in there that provide the ability to include any relevant textual data.
NG911, on the other hand, is IP based and extensible. Information can contain text and URLs to additional data that can be retrieved dynamically if needed, and wherever it exists. The one problem that remains is the legacy voice network, capable of transmitting one thing and one thing only, VOICE. How do we get the data over this network?
SIMPLE: YOU CAN’T
We have been waiting for a decade or more for the NG911 ESInet to be built, but that is coming in dribs and drabs, and access is anything but ubiquitous, so we did the next best thing. We took the information we had in our SENTRY™ solution in the Shelby County Buildings Department and delivered that information to RapidSOS during a 911 call. The call reached the Memphis Police Department in Shelby County, and they were able to retrieve the associated floor plans and information about the station that placed the 911 call.
ADDITIONAL, ADDITIONAL DATA
Along with floor plan information and emergency contact context, the SENTRY™ management console allowed text notes to be added to the incident record, and those additional notes were displayed to the call taker. History was made, and we moved the yardstick.
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