Hi Mark,
You caught me replying to the latest post on this one.
Yes - they do let you define remote sites and locations, which I mentally put akin to building subnet based / L3 tracking for a remote site in to the UCM to handle fixed locations. I wouldn't assume that is tenable to support from an administrative side of the shop for a home user, or somewhere that does not have a static IP. Sure, I suppose you could try it over VPN if that's possible with the application.
I agree with you on the need for these items to be available even in cloud softphone products, and wish that there was a better way to geo-locate with precision, without the customer's intervention, with plus or minus on that location data being available to applications. Today I believe some products would allow the customer to supply an address, which can be verified. As for the cellphones we've had customers want to use old or deactivated phones as mobile phones, so even there who knows if it will be able to place that emergency call or not. It should.
I also get the impression on the can-kicking in a way. Jabber's location services haven't improved much lately, and CER sure hasn't. But, there's money to be made so I'm sure something will become available. I too try and make sure that we can do the best we can, and thus provide room level granularity to responding agencies using CER, which required quite a bit of work to get that right. We had an XML app that popped the deskphones to confirm port maps, and have scripting to update the port/erl/etc files for us to import to CER. The need to shuttle all the calls to a PSAP will blow that up without buying a service, as I don't think anyone is going to want to have thousands of DIDs sitting there to be ELINs (which we find are also vectors for spoofed calls which create some unfortunate PSAP call back scenarios).
It will come around, I'm sure of that. If we can wait for that piece to be there before we end up shoving into "cloud" and wholesale nomadic softphone products, especially in light of the current situation, that I don't know.
Best,
Adam
From: Mark H. Turpin <mturpin@covene.com>
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2020 2:28 PM
To: Pawlowski, Adam <ajp26@buffalo.edu>; cisco-voip@puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: ng911
Adam,
Microsoft's Dynamic Location Routing & trusted IP architecture gets them to being NG911-compliant. It isn't just looking at the IP's geolocation, but rather an administrator can have a workflow that requires the user's external IP to be in the list of defined IPs, and that IP must have a dispatchable location associated to it.
For our current products, CER+CUCM/Jabber/Hybrid Teams calling, these things are all easily solved when the call is going through call control you can control, or PSTN you can control. But when you take away PSTN and call control, you need the software creator to provide the knobs and switches. Presently, Webex Teams + Cloud Calling has no knobs for us engineers to turn.
On one hand, Cisco isn't required to solve this problem and customers don't need to be compliant for nomadic users until 2022. I'm sure this is on their radar as Cisco has dedicated quite the landing page to the topic:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/unified-communications/next-gen-karis-law.html but I suspect it is a can that is being kicked down the road, maybe?
On the other hand, despite it not being required, I morally feel like we should provide the best information about a 911-caller to get the first responders to the right place, as quickly as possible. But, however it is accomplished, it can't be so burdensome that admins don't deploy it and users won't update it. It is my understanding that a 911 call through a Webex Calling cloud provider will only dispatch to the main corporate address. Perhaps that's fine for a retail store that's wide open and less than 5000 square feet. But I want to do better for facilities like a 40-story office building.
________________________________
From: Pawlowski, Adam <ajp26@buffalo.edu<mailto:ajp26@buffalo.edu>>
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2020 8:56 AM
To: Mark H. Turpin <mturpin@covene.com<mailto:mturpin@covene.com>>; cisco-voip@puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip@puck.nether.net> <cisco-voip@puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip@puck.nether.net>>
Subject: RE: ng911
*** EXTERNAL EMAIL - DO NOT CLICK LINKS ***
It is on the list of considerations for sure.
If I'm reading (skimmed) Microsoft's document you linked, this works more or less how the traditional E911 systems work, and do nothing for you for home or roaming users. In a way I am surprised there aren't some more solutions on the table, but, at the same time these disclaimers and the wording in a lot of the documentation is to try and shy away from any sort of liability. If I go to Bing to figure out how to order a pizza, both it and the pizza places can tell where I am pretty darn close just based on my IP address. You'd think that sort of thing would be a start to a 911 solution, but, it is imperfect, imprecise, and can be wrong - and the liability there may force some to just say, look, we can't do it - implement at your own risk.
Absolutely waiting on this one to be more well developed, but, I hazard that the business address solutions are just fine for SMB and not Enterprise, which holds true for whole hog implementations of these systems in general at the moment. (Costs, ROI, feature set, etc)
Adam
From: cisco-voip <cisco-voip-bounces@puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip-bounces@puck.nether.net>> On Behalf Of Mark H. Turpin
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 3:15 PM
To: cisco-voip@puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip@puck.nether.net>
Subject: [cisco-voip] ng911
Is anyone thinking about NG911 compatibility for pure Teams/Webex cloud calling? I understand Intrado/RedSky offerings for CER/on-prem/Jabber/hybrid calling.
The Webex Calling terms (
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/legal/OfferDescriptions/cisco_collaboration_flex_plan.pdf<
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cisco.com%2Fc%2Fdam%2Fen_us%2Fabout%2Fdoing_business%2Flegal%2FOfferDescriptions%2Fcisco_collaboration_flex_plan.pdf&data=01%7C01%7Cmturpin%40covene.com%7C59fe26dfa3be44b21e7b08d7e532ae6f%7C575b0cc755204e999cb37affbf511f45%7C1&sdata=jqYcsnYT1TWnXm2KDx8udhhsMoiQl21mDtditUSwqp4%3D&reserved=0>) state pretty clearly Cisco isn't supporting it today.
Emergency Response Disclaimer
YOUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE LOCATION FOR PURPOSES OF EMERGENCY CALLS IS LIMITED TO
YOUR COMPANY ADDRESS. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO ADVISE YOUR AUTHORIZED USERS
TO ALWAYS PROVIDE THEIR CURRENT LOCATION WHEN CALLING EMERGENCY SERVICES.
That disclaimer is fine except when a user is calling 911 and can't speak to provide their address.
While Ray Baum's Act isn't in effect yet, it seems like Microsoft might have a leg up on this already with Dynamic Location Routing capabilities via their LIS and trusted IP architecture.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/configure-dynamic-emergency-calling<
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fmicrosoftteams%2Fconfigure-dynamic-emergency-calling&data=01%7C01%7Cmturpin%40covene.com%7C59fe26dfa3be44b21e7b08d7e532ae6f%7C575b0cc755204e999cb37affbf511f45%7C1&sdata=8pLX9jYBe8jzu8VCKIRQPYYwWbZHtDnYdZenvEC6K0w%3D&reserved=0>
I don't have an answer yet, just starting the conversation.
-Mark