Foreword


Resilience, redundancy, reliability, security, interoperability, and efficiency. These are all ingredients for a great book on emergency location information and exchange. It has been a pleasure to meet the authors of this book, both at conferences internationally and in the UK. I had the pleasure of meeting with Martin Dawson when he was our guest at the NICC in the UK and whilst visiting one of our BT 999 call centers. The challenges discussed in this book, as well as their solutions, have been discussed in parallel with the authors on the other side of the world by myself, my colleagues, and members of the NICC and BT. When I met Martin in the U.S.A. at ATIS, he was like a breath of fresh air, and I discovered I was not the only one shouting "VoIP emergency access is international and this must not be forgotten!" The presence of the authors at these bodies shows not only commitment, but also a determination to ensure that this flow of IP information can function globally. The fundamentals of the solutions in this book are, in 2007, being followed and are currently under consideration for implementation in Australia, the U.S.A., Canada, and Europe. Voice over IP (VoIP) or Multimedia Voice over IP (MVoIP) is a rapidly growing market. The growth is evident in both the replacement of traditional fixed line networks and the uptake of soft phones. The range of access technologies is ever increasing and the mainstream is based on IP.

Many calls to the emergency services are silent calls. They are calls from people in distress who are unable to talk due to the prevailing situation, or they are from injured or sick people who may have dialed 911, 112, 999, 000, or one of the other national variants of emergency access numbers, but dropped the phone. These callers' locations not only need to be identified but also passed, accurately, around the appropriate services. In today's world of commerce, mobility, and users that are nomadic in nature, we can no longer rely on the home address details of callers being their actual location. Indeed, many corporate networks and VoIP-outsourced networks have single points of break-out from their networks onto the PSTN (such that the caller's location within the corporate network is concealed). There is a need for communication providers to take heed of the contents of this book. It is a must-read, not only for efficient planning and network implementation, but also to help save lives.

Ian Hopkins
BT 999 Product Manager VoIP,
United Kingdom,
25th July 2006



IP Location
IP Location
ISBN: 0072263776
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 129

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