I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know all of the minute technological or legal details about how and why our systems work the way I do. At the end of the day I’m a user of the systems, and not really privy to all of the technical and policy decisions happening behind the scenes.

I believe that handset gps based location is part of the Next Gen 911 (NG911) standards that are in the process of rolling out. Different agencies and corporations that own and maintain the infrastructure are in different stages of implementing that in different places. I don’t really know what the timetable is on all of that is, if there even is one, I’m genuinely not sure if there’s any set in stone date where everything everywhere must be fully ng911 compliant by then.

The handful of counties around me are definitely in different stages of rolling it out, my dispatch center has had text to 911 capabilities since well before I started there 6 years ago, and I’m pretty sure one of our neighboring agencies only got the ability to handle it within the last 2 years or so. Another neighboring county is or is about to get video capabilities, which we don’t have yet.

I suspect that the current state of the regulations is that new phones must have the ability to send that gps data, but I don’t think it needs to be turned on by default, and I don’t think dispatch centers are required to make use of it yet, but again I’m not sure.

The current state of it where I work is we get it on a lot of our calls but not all. It’s also kind of a hacked together system where it comes through on a web page and not directly integrated into our phone or CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems. I believe the new CAD we’re upgrading to will have it fully integrated, but last I heard that is probably still a couple years away.

Phone networks are kind of a mess, countless different companies, contractors, and different levels of government, have all been working together (or sometimes against each other depending on your point of view) to patch together old legacy systems to the new stuff coming out- copper, fiber, analog, digital, cellular, satellite, VoIP, etc. And different levels of government have more or less funds available to them and allocate those funds differently, so the wheels of government, as they say, turn slowly. I work in a relatively wealthy county with a pretty large population in a highly developed part of the country, so we’re probably towards the leading edge of the new tech rolling out compared to some dispatch center in the backwoods middle of nowhere (I have had to talk to dispatchers all over the country and occasionally even in other countries, there are definitely some with better capabilities than we have, and there are also some where you get the distinct impression that you’re talking to one of two old ladies sitting in a trailer behind the police station sharing a carton of Virginia Slims and entering calls into a computer with a faded sticker proudly declaring that it’s Y2K ready.)