Tension Builds Over E-911 Cell Phone Plan
After Chicago public school teacher Wardella Winchester was kidnapped in March and forced into a car trunk, she pulled out a cell phone and dialed for help.
But from the dark confines of the trunk, Winchester couldn’t offer a clue where she was. And in Chicago, like most areas of the country, 911 dispatchers can’t pinpoint a wireless phone with the accuracy of calls made from conventional wired phones. By the time police found her two days later in nearby Indiana, she had been fatally shot.
“If we had the same kind of technology we have for [ordinary phones], chances are excellent that we would have been able to locate her” earlier, said Larry Langford, a spokesman for the Chicago Office of Emergency Communications.
Determined to avert such tragedies by making cell phones easier to find, federal regulators and lawmakers are poised for a showdown with the powerful wireless phone industry over a promising but controversial technology that would track a mobile phone within 150 to 1,000 feet of its location.
An Oct. 1 deadline to start implementing the new tracking system, known as E-911, has been looming for five years. But Verizon Wireless, Nextel Communications Inc., AT&T; Wireless Services Inc. and 19 other carriers have asked for up to a year’s delay, citing questions about the reliability and high cost of E-911.
The requests have infuriated California Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Atherton) and 15 other members of Congress. They wrote Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell on July 31, saying, “There has been adequate time for wireless carriers and manufacturers to take the necessary steps which would allow them to meet these long-established deadlines. Any further delays in E-911 deployment may result in the loss of life.”
Powell could not be reached for comment. But in a statement sent July 26 to Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), Powell said he too was fed up with the E-911 delays.
“Because full E-911 implementation is an important public safety goal, we will not hesitate to take whatever enforcement action is warranted in cases where carriers fail to comply with the commission’s E-911 requirements for both Phase 1 and Phase 2 implementation,” Powell wrote.
The political furor over E-911 has erupted in large part as a result of the success the wireless industry has had in promoting cell phones as a safety and security device.
A charitable foundation backed by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Assn., a Washington trade group, has given more than 50,000 wireless phones to women’s shelters since 1993. And the CTIA says about 51 million calls are made to 911 and other emergency numbers each year by the nation’s 120 million cell phone users.
The E-911 tracking system could also enable merchants to reach out and touch cell phone users as they walk past stores. Mobile e-commerce is expected to grow into a $208.8-million market by 2005, estimates Cahners In-Stat Group, a Boston consulting firm. But Cahners wireless analyst Ken Hyers said, “No way will mobile commerce cover the cost of building out” E-911, which is expected to cost more than $2 billion.
Part of that cost is footed by monthly phone surcharges consumers pay to state governments. California’s upgrade is planned to cost about $155 million over three years for the new hardware and software to handle the state’s 500 call-answering centers.
The E-911 tracking system works by analyzing signals sent between mobile handsets and global positioning satellites or transmission towers.
Under current FCC rules, carriers that plan to rely on new handsets to provide E-911 tracking technology must begin selling and activating such handsets no later than Oct. 1. After that date, they must meet certain activation milestones. Those culminate in a requirement that 100% of the new handsets be in use by the end of 2005.
Carriers that plan to install tracking technologies only in their network must serve 100% of a community within 18 months of a request from local public safety officials or by Oct. 1, 2002, whichever is later.
Consumers will shoulder some of the cost of the E-911 transition by paying as much as $50 more per wireless phone for new microchips needed to provide tracking technology. But carriers also will need to upgrade equipment in tens of thousands of cell towers around the country.
Despite the considerable cost, wireless industry officials say they support E-911 and want to move forward. But they say they have been hamstrung by immature tracking technology as well as state public safety departments that are themselves behind in making the transition to E-911.
In comments filed with the FCC last month, Verizon Wireless said, “Given the realities of the long process for commercial handset development, testing, manufacture, distribution and sale . . . the rule’s handset deployment schedule is unachievable, for others as well as for Verizon Wireless.”
Tom Wheeler, president of the CTIA, echoed Verizon’s concerns about the technology. But he insisted that the industry is behind E-911: “Having this capability, after all, opens up a huge new market in terms of mobile commerce. . . . I keep asking the E-911 community to come up with an enforceable schedule.”
Two high-ranking FCC officials, who spoke with The Times but declined to be identified, said the agency is considering accelerating the overall four-year timetable for fully implementing the E-911 technology--perhaps by as much as a year.
Meanwhile, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) proposed a location privacy law last month that would restrict phone companies’ ability to capitalize on mobile commerce by entering into marketing deals that would let merchants use tracking data to pitch to consumers by phone as they walk past stores.
Under the bill, companies that provide wireless services would have to notify consumers when collecting information about their location. Companies could not disclose or sell the information without first obtaining a consumer’s consent.
Although companies offering phone tracking, such as U.S. Wireless Corp. of San Ramon, Calif., say they have developed reliable technology, phone carriers have not been beating down their doors.
“We have been talking to a variety of carriers for the last couple of years now,” but none has signed up yet, said U.S. Wireless spokesman Paul Brunato. “This technology could be saving lives.”
