RedSky Debuts 'E911 Anywhere' At Interop

RedSky Technologies on Thursday at the Interop show in New York City launched a new service that tracks the location of IP phones and routes 911 calls to a public safety point.

The service, called E911 Anywhere, can track the location of IP phones both inside and outside the enterprise, and it's able to intelligently route 911 calls to the correct local Public Safety Answering Point in the United States and Canada. To use the service, companies don't have to purchase expensive 911 trunks, according to RedSky.

Here's how the service works: When someone makes a 911 call, the enterprise call server sends the call to the E911 Anywhere service, which recognizes the location of the caller and routes the call accordingly to a public safety point.

E911 Anywhere has to be used in conjunction with RedSky's E911 Manager, an application that handles the location tracking of phones and provides location records to E911 Anywhere, which then validates and stores the information.

Instead of a 911 trunk, E911 Anywhere utilizes a company's wide area network to deliver all 911 calls. RedSky says the service works with any type of phone, as long as it's on the enterprise IP network. This includes analog, digital, IP hardphones, softphones, and SIP phones. RedSky also offers additional options for large companies that operate their own public safety points, such as call recording and call bifurcation.

Pricing for E911 Anywhere depends on the number of phones using the service, which is billed monthly.

Earlier this month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee began considering bills for a broadband census and to modernize the emergency 911 system for voice over IP. One of the bills, the 911 Modernization and Public Safety Act of 2007, is meant to ensure that people using VoIP can reach 911 operators, and it would give VoIP providers the same liability protections that other telecommunications providers have.

Verizon Business in May started building an enhanced 911 emergency communications system that will link New York's public safety units together and function in the event of a major disaster. According to the Federal Communications Commission, enhanced 911 or E911 seeks to improve the effectiveness and reliability of wireless 911 services by providing dispatchers with additional information on wireless 911 calls, including the location of the caller.