FCC Chmn. Powell said Fri. that while the Commission had seen an ...

make sure that every link in the chain is tight enough so that it remains effective.” He spoke to reporters following live demonstrations by AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless and Nextel of E911 Phase 2 technology at the Alexandria, Va., 911 Communication Center. A report completed within the last year by Dale Hatfield, former chief of the FCC Office of Engineering & Technology, had cited issues involving LEC implementation as holding up the timing of the rollouts of some Phase 2 systems. Some public safety groups have called LEC implementation “the missing link” in E911 deployment. “As we work through the process, we come to realize the significance of a part that might not have been originally envisioned,” Powell said: “I think we've really begun to understand the significance of the local phone companies’ participation.” The Commission recently began a stronger “supervisory role” in surveying LECs to understand what their capabilities were and what facilities they had deployed, he said: “We have seen improvement but we have a lot more to go and we are going to continue to work on that.” At the demonstration, dispatchers were fielding live emergency calls while Emergency Communications Technician Supervisor Marietta Robinson vetted test calls from carriers. She used a mouse to zero in on incoming latitude and longitude coordinates for the test calls, providing details down to each building on a nearby city block. “There are 3 things that make this difficult -- its complexity, coordination and bucks,” Powell told reporters in a Q&A Fri. following the demonstration. He cited the usefulness of legislation such as that sponsored by Senate Telecom Subcommittee Chmn. Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) that would provide matching grant money for localities for E911 implementation and would require that state funds collected for 911 not be used elsewhere. A demonstration E911 Phase 2 call from the AT&T Wireless network hit a glitch when routing software from a 3rd-party vendor inadvertently routed the call to a neighboring Arlington County, Va., public safety answering point (PSAP). Such calls, when misdirected through such routing software, automatically and instantly are routed to the correct PSAP for emergency response, officials said. Curt Andrich, a senior consultant with Kimmel & Assoc., which has advised PSAPs in Va. on E911 implementation, said the hiccup that had mis-routed the call was the doing of a 3rd-party vendor, not AT&T Wireless. When a wireless call comes into a tower, “the database software is remote and is queried electronically,” he said.