6th Standards Development Organizations (SDO) Emergency Services Workshop
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - November 4th-5th 2009

.

Background

Summoning police, fire department, ambulance or other services in case of emergency is one of the fundamental and most-valued functions of the telephone. As telephone functionality moves from switched circuits to the IP packets, users rightfully expect this core service to continue to work. New devices, which are not telephones, are appearing, and users increasingly expect them to support emergency call capabilities. However, many of the advantages of Internet multimedia require re-thinking of the traditional emergency calling architecture and regulations. These challenges offer an opportunity to improve the operation of emergency calling and increase its reliability, while lowering operational cost and complexity.

Traditional emergency services rely exclusively on voice and conventional text telephony (often called TTY) media streams. The Internet protocol (IP), however, offers more choices of media and additional ways to communicate allowing callers to provide more or different information to call-takers assisting them to evaluate and handle emergency calls. For example, video could be used to show the nature of an accident or other situation, helping the call-taker to decide on which emergency service responders are required. Future emergency services will allow the creation of sessions of any media type, negotiated between the caller and Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) using existing SIP protocol mechanisms.

Motivations

The Internet is global, and solutions developed for the Internet inherently work regardless of where in the world they are connected to the Internet. Emergency calling is such an essential service that for VoIP and other IP communication streams it must work in the same way not matter how or where the device is attached to the Internet. This workshop provides an overview of how POTS emergency calls are made, how cellular emergency calls are made, why VoIP is different, the main open Internet emergency calling architectures, and what is being trialled and deployed around the world.

Goals

The high-level goals of this emergency services workshop are:

One of the main goals of the emergency services workshop series is to build a community of emergency services experts. In order to enable workshop attendees to interact in an informal setting, the organizers have set up a social event.

Audience

This is a public workshop and hence everyone may join. We encourage participation from:

Agenda

Day 1

  • Welcome address - Agenda and speaker profile 9:00 to 9:30 (James Winterbottom)
  • Cellular and POTS emergency calling 9:30 to 10:30 (Martin Dawson)
  • Coffee/tea break: 10:30 to 10:45
  • IETF, ECRIT 10:45 to 12:00 (Richard Barnes)
  • Lunch: 12:00 to 1:00pm
  • IETF, ECRIT 13:00 to 14:00 (Richard Barnes)
  • Demonstration and Q&A 14:00 to 15:15
  • Coffee/tea break: 15:15 to 15:30
  • Case Study: NENA i2 and NENA i3 15:30 to 17:00 (Roger Marshall)
  • Social event 18:00 to 20:00

Day 2

  • IP enabled PSAPs 9:00 to 9:45 (Roger Hixson)
  • Case Study: Canadian i2 9:45 to 10:30 (Prepared by Guy Caron, presented by James Winterbottom)
  • Coffee/tea break: 10:30 to 10:45
  • Case Study: Austria and Europe NGN ES landscape 10:45 to 12:00 (Gregor Jaenin)
  • Lunch: 12:00 to 13:00
  • Panel session: Are VoIP and Internet different to Cellular/POTS and PSTN? 13:00 to 14:00 (Richard Barnes, Martin Dawson, TBD)
  • Case Study: Swedish NGN ES 14:00 to 14:45 (Nils Weidstam)
  • Coffee/tea break: 14:45 to 15:15
  • Case Study: UK i2 15:15 to 16:00 (John Medland)
  • Q&A, next workshop and wrap up 16:00 to 16:30 (James Winterbottom)

Workshop Venue

The meeting will take place here:

The Westin Kuala Lumpur
199, Jalan Bukit Bintang
Kuala Lumpur 55100
Malaysia
Tel: +603 2731 8333

The hotel is located in city central and easily accessible by train or taxi from the airport.

Workshop Participation

This workshop is opened to the public and there will be no fee required. Participant registration is however required for planning purposes. To register, please click
.

Program Chairs

The workshop is organized by the following persons:

Workshop Sponsor

This workshop is brought to you by Andrew Solutions, A CommScope Company.


Andrew
If you have questions please direct them to Hannes.Tschofenig@gmx.net or to james.winterbottom@andrew.com with a subject header of "SDO Emergency Services Workshop".