Why Can't 911 Find You If Lyft Can?

Smartphone apps like Lyft and even Facebook seem able to identify our location with near-perfect accuracy, but the 911 emergency service still struggles. Learn why -- and what's being done about it -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Brainstuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Whether you're trying to order a
ride or figure out what restaurants are nearby, you've probably
grown accustomed to the notion that your smartphone continuously tracks
your location. But you may be surprised to discover that
while phone apps seem to be able to find you
pretty easily, operators can have a much more difficult time

(00:25):
pinpointing your location in an emergency when you call for
help from a mobile phone. That's because wireless service providers,
which are required by the Federal Communications Commission to provide
callers locations to nine one systems, often are using data
from different, sometimes less precise sources than your phone uses
to pinpoint a location, and according to the FCC website,

(00:47):
of nine one one calls are placed from mobile phones.
In Sacramento, TV station Fox forty demonstrated the extent of
the problem by having a producer stand on a street
corner and make test calls to the local d N
system using phones from several different wireless providers. They got
disconcertingly varied results. One carrier's data was able to pinpoint

(01:09):
the caller's location within twenty six feet that's about eight meters,
while another errantly gave a location that was a mile
away that's just over one and a half kilometers. And
that's a scary problem because when the nine one system
gets an inaccurate location, it means the police, the fire department,
or the ambulance crew may lose precious time trying to
find you. That's the sort of delay that has tragically

(01:30):
proven fatal in more than one case. So why does
nine one one sometimes have more difficulty finding callers than
say lift? For decades, wireless providers have relied upon information
from phones, pinging cellular towers, and from the Global Positioning
System also known as GPS to provide location estimates for
nine one one systems. You'd think that would work pretty well,

(01:53):
but according to Evelyn Bailey, executive director of the National
Association of State nine one one Administrators and former head
of a once first enhanced nine one one system, those
methods aren't always so reliable. She said, it depends upon
the infrastructure that's available where the collar is located. Let's
say you're outdoors in a place where you're close to
a cell tower and the GPS signal isn't obstructed, you're

(02:16):
probably okay. But if you're out in the mountains where
cell coverage is spotty, or inside a building containing lots
of metal in a densely developed urban area, it could
be a lot tougher. Your phone, though, has other ways
to locate you. Thanks to technological advances by mobile phone manufacturers,
your device can use your proximity to Wi Fi networks
and Bluetooth beacons, and even readings from the barometer that

(02:39):
you probably didn't realize was built into your phone. That
data comes from what's known as the user plane, and
historically wireless carriers haven't trusted it as a location source
to fulfill their regulatory obligations. But even if they did,
Bailey notes that existing nine systems aren't engineered in a
way that makes it easy for them to accept that
data into their location stream. Fortunately, though, the wireless telecom

(03:01):
industry and organizations representing systems have been working together for
years on finding technological solutions, and as of the FCC
issued new regulations that set a timetable for improving the
accuracy of the location information the carriers provide. By one,
they have to be able to provide a dispatchable location

(03:23):
at least eight percent of the time a dispatchable location,
meaning one that's within a hundred and sixty four feet
or fifty meters of where a caller is located. Also,
they have to be able to provide barometric pressure from
any phone that measures it, which could make it easier
to pinpoint altitude and figure out what Florina building a
caller is calling from. The industry is also working on

(03:43):
developing and testing the National Emergency Address Database. This will
include the locations of WiFi hotspots, Bluetooth beacons, and other
parts of the modern world electronic infrastructure. Eventually, the database
will be able to accept data that consumers provide about
their home WiFi networks if they choose was to provide it.

(04:05):
Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger and produced
by Tyler Clang for iHeartMedia and How Stuff Works. For
more on this and lots of other pointed topics, visit
our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.