Forget defeat, just look at the normal margin of error... Forget fixed-line services, location is easy to solve for that. Let's look at things like a guy sitting on a mountain top with a BBQ grill antenna, and amp, and a WiFi card. I could make VOIP calls from Apple's public Wireless network from 25 miles away on top of Loma Prietta if I wanted to. (In fact, I did once, just to test it). If someone put a wireless bridge up there, then, I could make the same call from downtown Monterey. The first IP device would still be in Cupertino. I'd be in a different county (at least 2 counties away), in a different LATA, and, in completely different CHP dispatch zones. Even CDF would expect me to be talking to a different dispatch center. Doing this right is not only hard, but, it's also just not that desirable in my opinion. It's a huge invasion of privacy as far as I'm concerned. Owen --On July 20, 2005 3:19:41 PM -0500 Shane Owens <shaneowens@dna-communications.com> wrote:
Why not standardize this across the board for all access devices? As an example if my Broadband provider was required to enter location information in my cable modem so that when I connected a VOIP device (ATA, IAD, PC, etc) it would query the first IP device it encountered and gather location data that would solve a lot of these problems. Any solution can be circumvented so no solution will be perfect, but this idea seems easy enough to accomplish with existing technology. It would even fix the VPN connection issue, unless the user was purposefully trying to obfuscate himself in which case I don't think we are necessarily concerned about his ability to contact emergency services.
Shane
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 7:22 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service
<snip> Maybe we should lobby government to require Wi-Fi access point manufacturers to include location information in their devices. After that, the VoIP operators and the Wi-Fi access operators should be able to sort out some protocol for sharing the location info.
Welcome to the 21st century! They never said it was going to be easy.
--Michael Dillon
-- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.