The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
A key safeguard is the alternative address flag (AAF): an indicator that the service provider must give to the emergency call operator if it cannot guarantee the accuracy of address information associated with an incoming call. If the alternate address flag is set to 'true' the address cannot be relied on.
However, according to the ACMA's discussion paper this safeguard is not universally implemented: "Until May 2007 when the 0550 number range for VoIP services was introduced [but which remains largely unused] any VoIP service requiring a public number was allocated a geographic number and was classified in INPD [the Integrated Public Number Database] as a fixed geographic service. However there is no certainty the AAF has been routinely set to true for these services."
So, it has been proposed that emergency service operators should ask for location details of every caller except where there is a high degree of confidence that the service is a fixed residential service and not a VoIP service (how this level of confidence would be gained is not explained).
In the absence of a system that can present address location with 100 percent reliability no information at all might be the beset option, by forcing the operator to request it. However such a system clearly has the potential to precipitate as many tragedies as it prevents: callers may not know or be unable to communicate the address they are calling from.
ACMA notes that "a robust and universal technical solution for determining the location of a nomadic [eg VoIP] service is yet to be fully developed....being some years away."
The planned long term solution is for network equipment, such as ADSL modems, to be location aware so that it can be interrogated to obtain the location of the attached customer. Given that most such equipment is built to global standards for a global market any technology would have to operate to globally agreed standards using an internationally agreed set of protocols. That will take years.
The ACMA notes in the discussion paper that the number of VoIP users expected to become significant, if not dominant over the next few years. There are likely to be more tragedies like this one waiting to happen.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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