7 ms·

It's interesting that the article doesn't address this, but the reason I think that relying only on cellphones without a landline is risky has to do with emerge

by xigency 11y ago

It's interesting that the article doesn't address this, but the reason I think that relying only on cellphones without a landline is risky has to do with emergency situations, and for some reason I thought the CDC would tie into that, but maybe I've just been watching too much of the walking dead. In the case of a cellphone-only household, it's really easy to think of a time when all of the cellphone holders are not present, so that there's no real contact into or out of the house, potentially with people present. In the case of a 911 situation like someone choking or having a heart attack (or a fire) that could come down to going up and down the street knocking on a neighbor's door, or jumping in a sedan to race to the hospital. I also wonder how accurate geo-location would be for 911 calls, where it's very easy (I would hope) for 911 operators to know the exact street address of someone making an emergency call, even if they ask for the address as well.

morgante 11y ago
That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios. The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  I called 911 from my cell phone for a carbon monoxide detector incident and they had no idea where I was. I was transferred around multiple times and gave my address more than once. It took multiple minutes to get the call completed and it was probably at least 10 minutes before the fire department arrived. Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.
  - ssully 11y ago
    Similar situation. Came home to my house broken into, backdoor was completely smashed in, luckily the robbers were gone. When I called 911 from my cell I got an operator from a neighboring town; my house is on the border of a major US city and some small neighboring towns. While they were trying to transfer me I just went inside and used my landline and got connected before they finished transferring.
  - morgante 11y ago
    When was this? Wireless E911 is still relatively recent.
    - nsxwolf 11y ago
      About 2 years ago.
  - VLM 11y ago
    The problem with anecdote collection as a tool to compare to across eras is the pre-social media pre-internet pre-wireless world had 911 problems, but they'll never be documented and are lost in the ether. Did my deceased for 20 years grandma have problems connecting via 911 when calling an ambulance for my deceased for 30 years grandfather? Well, maybe, but who will ever know? However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about. There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...) I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.
    - nsxwolf 11y ago
      Well before cell phones I had assumed 911 was nearly perfectly reliable and could only get better with new technology. Random news stories about dispatchers screwing up didn't do much to shake me of that belief. I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.
  - xanderstrike 11y ago
    That's very strange. I called 911 about a motorcycle accident a couple months ago. I was on the freeway and not sure exactly where I was, I said something like "101 somewhere between LA and the valley? I don't know I wasn't watching the exit signs." They were immediately able to locate me, I assume from my phone's geolocation, and CHP was there in minutes.
    - fspeech 11y ago
      Locating you on a freeway (a 1d constraint) is a lot easier than locating a residence (a 2d or 3d constraint).
      - ams6110 11y ago
        When I start up Google Maps on my phone it pinpoints my location to my house. 911 service also activates the GPS, so why would it be any less accurate? Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
        nonbel 11y ago
        People without landlines seemed to be healthier, if anything: "Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
        fspeech 11y ago
        911 services should use Google Maps! Seriously, this is a non-trivial problem. GPS data alone does not have the precision. However from all the data that Google has collected from driving those mapping vans around, Google should have accurate topography data (elevation is important for making GPS more precise for non planar geographies) and should have building locations through, say, visual analysis of the street photos. With the additional inputs it can make a better guess of your most likely location. The improvement is probabilistic, not guaranteed. And it is only available if your phone is capable of communicating at the right level with the service (provided by your app in the Google Maps case) that has the enhanced information. But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.
  - ryan-c 11y ago
    Do not call 911 from your cell phone if you are at home. You'll most likely (at least in the bay area) get CHP, and their dispatch center frequently has hold times of several minutes. More than enough time for it to be too late. Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly. A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_cellphone_numbers.doc http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_... Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.
- cgriswald 11y ago
  > That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios. It is much less of a problem then it used to be, but cell phones haven't reached 100% parity with landlines. Consider: 1. Cell phones require reception. At my house, cell reception is universally awful for all providers. I may not be able to even make a call to 911 on a cell phone and, if I do, I am not sure I can trust the reliability of e911. Work arounds include in-home Wi-Fi and femtocells, but... 2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of my daughter, even a five minute one), I can't gaurantee there will even be a working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't work, either. 3. Cell phones get misplaced. In an emergency will I even remember where in the house I set it down? That's not to say that cell phones don't also offer many advantages in an emergency. They do. Cell phones are usually available and usually close to a person. They can be turned on and hidden but still allow 911 operators to hear what is going on. There is usually about one cell phone per person, etc., etc. But, at my house at least, I can't completely forgo a landline (although I have at other locations in the past).
  - morgante 11y ago
    > 1. Cell phones require reception. This is definitely a valid concern if it applies to you. My mother, for example, would never give up her landline because the reception at her house is definitely inferior to her landline. I, on the other hand, have consistently excellent reception. I think in general people who have good reception are the ones going land-line only. > 2. Cell phones require power. These days, so do many landlines (especially handheld/wireless ones). I could keep my phone charged for 48 hours of normal usage (backup batteries) and far longer if I went into power saving mode. > 3. Cell phones get misplaced. A cell phone is always on my person, whereas I would have to hunt down where the landline is. I guess there are tradeoffs to both, so I'm not comfortable saying you must have only one or the other.
    - VLM 11y ago
      "A cell phone is always on my person" Its one of the defining social/cultural separations of our generation. Even inside families, my wife is a member of your camp and her phone is never out of her physical possession, ever, it even charges next to her in bed, whereas I'm in the other camp and I move my phone from charger to charger and only physically carry it when I'm going out for awhile or if I'm expecting a call. It has the virtue that in any group of people, there will always be at least one with the ankle bracelet ready for use in one second, even if the battery is nearly dead, and at least one with a fully charged phone a couple minutes away on its charger. So as a group you can get both instant response AND a full day of battery life.
- daveguy 11y ago
  I hope they compensated for age. Youth is also correlated with risky behavior.
  - boken 11y ago
    This is addressed at length - and quite early on - in the article. The correlation stands, apparently.
    - daveguy 11y ago
      Thanks for the heads up. They say there is both a youth element and an income element and claim the effect is present even compensating for youth. However, there are exactly zero statistics (alpha, p, confidence, nothing) to justify the conclusion.
      - boken 11y ago
        Which is why I wrote 'apparently.' This is an interview with NPR, not an academic paper. You may as well question whether the correlation exists at all as hone in on this one point.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- RightWingRabble 11y ago
  > They're saying it correlates with risky behavior. Except that's not what they're saying. This is literally what they're saying: "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior." That doesn't really compute to me. My 80 year old grandparents have been cell phone only for about 5 years, because it's just as cheap as a landline and they can call from anywhere. Same with my 60 year old parents. It makes them feel safer to be able to call from the car in case their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. These are very conservative people. They own their house. They've had the same jobs for a decade+. They don't smoke. They drink moderately. The riskiest thing they do in any given day is drive to work. Granted, this is n=1, but I can name about half a dozen other households who are about the same in a very conservative rural area who have also dropped their land lines.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior." No, that's their explanation for why there might be a correlation. It's quite clearly not something they're actually certain about. The only fact the CDC believes is that cell phone exclusivity correlates with risky behaviors.
- daveguy 11y ago
  The CDC isn't even saying that. As far as I can tell there is no linked study backing up the claims in the article. Just one guy saying "trust us, the correlation is there even when compensating for age and income". Statistics, please.
jsjohnst 11y ago
It's been a number of years since I was involved in e911 rollout, but at that time geolocation for 911 was very rough. We were doing this testing in Kansas (I was literally handed a map of every cell sector in the county and a script to read as I called into 911 a hundred times a day from each sector), but accuracy at best was within a block or two. I'm sure technology has improved since then, but the apt complex I live in now in NYC has 25,000 residents over 80 acres. My guess is the closest geolocation they'd get is to a cluster of a couple buildings, which could easily be close to 500 different residences.
jpollock 11y ago
If the house has previously had a landline it must be active for 911 service. You must be able to plug a phone in, pick it up and dial 911 - even without having dial-tone. 911 service from a landline is independent of having a paid account with the carrier. The same applies to cell companies - which is why you might see a "emergency calls only" flag in areas of poor service.
- ipsin 11y ago
  That's no longer true in California, unfortunately. It was a really nice feature for disconnected land lines, but the industry had the law changed. http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Consumer+Information/Changes+in+Calling+9-1-1+from+a+Traditional+Landline.htm http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Consumer+Information/Change...
  - BEEdwards 11y ago
    Am I wrong or does that really seem like as much of a mustache twirlingly evil thing to do as I think? Can't have those poors making emergency medical calls until they pay what they owe.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      You think they actually bothered to hold a conscious image in their mind of the consequence of their actions, rather than just reasoning from "it costs us money" to "let's have our bought-and-paid-for legislators get rid of it"?
      - ipsin 11y ago
        Yeah, I'm imagining that the conversations were Entirely Reasonable. Something like, "the world is changing, people are moving off land-lines, and we can't be expected to maintain dead lines in perpetuity". The disgusting thing is, after this passed, the rates jumped about 50%. I was willing to pay under $20/month for land line service, but paying almost $30/month (for metered access, even for local calls!) was just too much. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/business/la-fi-lazarus-20130212 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/business/la-fi-lazar... "Since 2011, the California Public Utilities Commission has allowed phone companies to raise -- or lower -- basic phone rates whenever they choose, rather than seek approval from regulators. Since then, costs have steadily gone up." This, and the fact that the state now controls cable TV franchises, have left me pretty disillusioned with California government.
mcmillion 11y ago
If all the cellphones holders are not present and someone in the house needs 911, I'm fine with that, because that person shouldn't be in my house.
- xigency 11y ago
  You must not have seen the movie Home Alone.

by xigency 11y ago

morgante 11y ago

That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios. The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.

nsxwolf 11y ago
I called 911 from my cell phone for a carbon monoxide detector incident and they had no idea where I was. I was transferred around multiple times and gave my address more than once. It took multiple minutes to get the call completed and it was probably at least 10 minutes before the fire department arrived. Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.
- ssully 11y ago
  Similar situation. Came home to my house broken into, backdoor was completely smashed in, luckily the robbers were gone. When I called 911 from my cell I got an operator from a neighboring town; my house is on the border of a major US city and some small neighboring towns. While they were trying to transfer me I just went inside and used my landline and got connected before they finished transferring.
- morgante 11y ago
  When was this? Wireless E911 is still relatively recent.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    About 2 years ago.
- VLM 11y ago
  The problem with anecdote collection as a tool to compare to across eras is the pre-social media pre-internet pre-wireless world had 911 problems, but they'll never be documented and are lost in the ether. Did my deceased for 20 years grandma have problems connecting via 911 when calling an ambulance for my deceased for 30 years grandfather? Well, maybe, but who will ever know? However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about. There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...) I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    Well before cell phones I had assumed 911 was nearly perfectly reliable and could only get better with new technology. Random news stories about dispatchers screwing up didn't do much to shake me of that belief. I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.
- xanderstrike 11y ago
  That's very strange. I called 911 about a motorcycle accident a couple months ago. I was on the freeway and not sure exactly where I was, I said something like "101 somewhere between LA and the valley? I don't know I wasn't watching the exit signs." They were immediately able to locate me, I assume from my phone's geolocation, and CHP was there in minutes.
  - fspeech 11y ago
    Locating you on a freeway (a 1d constraint) is a lot easier than locating a residence (a 2d or 3d constraint).
    - ams6110 11y ago
      When I start up Google Maps on my phone it pinpoints my location to my house. 911 service also activates the GPS, so why would it be any less accurate? Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
      - nonbel 11y ago
        People without landlines seemed to be healthier, if anything: "Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
      - fspeech 11y ago
        911 services should use Google Maps! Seriously, this is a non-trivial problem. GPS data alone does not have the precision. However from all the data that Google has collected from driving those mapping vans around, Google should have accurate topography data (elevation is important for making GPS more precise for non planar geographies) and should have building locations through, say, visual analysis of the street photos. With the additional inputs it can make a better guess of your most likely location. The improvement is probabilistic, not guaranteed. And it is only available if your phone is capable of communicating at the right level with the service (provided by your app in the Google Maps case) that has the enhanced information. But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.
- ryan-c 11y ago
  Do not call 911 from your cell phone if you are at home. You'll most likely (at least in the bay area) get CHP, and their dispatch center frequently has hold times of several minutes. More than enough time for it to be too late. Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly. A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_cellphone_numbers.doc http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_... Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.
cgriswald 11y ago
> That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios. It is much less of a problem then it used to be, but cell phones haven't reached 100% parity with landlines. Consider: 1. Cell phones require reception. At my house, cell reception is universally awful for all providers. I may not be able to even make a call to 911 on a cell phone and, if I do, I am not sure I can trust the reliability of e911. Work arounds include in-home Wi-Fi and femtocells, but... 2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of my daughter, even a five minute one), I can't gaurantee there will even be a working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't work, either. 3. Cell phones get misplaced. In an emergency will I even remember where in the house I set it down? That's not to say that cell phones don't also offer many advantages in an emergency. They do. Cell phones are usually available and usually close to a person. They can be turned on and hidden but still allow 911 operators to hear what is going on. There is usually about one cell phone per person, etc., etc. But, at my house at least, I can't completely forgo a landline (although I have at other locations in the past).
- morgante 11y ago
  > 1. Cell phones require reception. This is definitely a valid concern if it applies to you. My mother, for example, would never give up her landline because the reception at her house is definitely inferior to her landline. I, on the other hand, have consistently excellent reception. I think in general people who have good reception are the ones going land-line only. > 2. Cell phones require power. These days, so do many landlines (especially handheld/wireless ones). I could keep my phone charged for 48 hours of normal usage (backup batteries) and far longer if I went into power saving mode. > 3. Cell phones get misplaced. A cell phone is always on my person, whereas I would have to hunt down where the landline is. I guess there are tradeoffs to both, so I'm not comfortable saying you must have only one or the other.
  - VLM 11y ago
    "A cell phone is always on my person" Its one of the defining social/cultural separations of our generation. Even inside families, my wife is a member of your camp and her phone is never out of her physical possession, ever, it even charges next to her in bed, whereas I'm in the other camp and I move my phone from charger to charger and only physically carry it when I'm going out for awhile or if I'm expecting a call. It has the virtue that in any group of people, there will always be at least one with the ankle bracelet ready for use in one second, even if the battery is nearly dead, and at least one with a fully charged phone a couple minutes away on its charger. So as a group you can get both instant response AND a full day of battery life.
daveguy 11y ago
I hope they compensated for age. Youth is also correlated with risky behavior.
- boken 11y ago
  This is addressed at length - and quite early on - in the article. The correlation stands, apparently.
  - daveguy 11y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. They say there is both a youth element and an income element and claim the effect is present even compensating for youth. However, there are exactly zero statistics (alpha, p, confidence, nothing) to justify the conclusion.
    - boken 11y ago
      Which is why I wrote 'apparently.' This is an interview with NPR, not an academic paper. You may as well question whether the correlation exists at all as hone in on this one point.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
RightWingRabble 11y ago
> They're saying it correlates with risky behavior. Except that's not what they're saying. This is literally what they're saying: "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior." That doesn't really compute to me. My 80 year old grandparents have been cell phone only for about 5 years, because it's just as cheap as a landline and they can call from anywhere. Same with my 60 year old parents. It makes them feel safer to be able to call from the car in case their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. These are very conservative people. They own their house. They've had the same jobs for a decade+. They don't smoke. They drink moderately. The riskiest thing they do in any given day is drive to work. Granted, this is n=1, but I can name about half a dozen other households who are about the same in a very conservative rural area who have also dropped their land lines.
- morgante 11y ago
  > "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior." No, that's their explanation for why there might be a correlation. It's quite clearly not something they're actually certain about. The only fact the CDC believes is that cell phone exclusivity correlates with risky behaviors.
daveguy 11y ago
The CDC isn't even saying that. As far as I can tell there is no linked study backing up the claims in the article. Just one guy saying "trust us, the correlation is there even when compensating for age and income". Statistics, please.

jsjohnst 11y ago

It's been a number of years since I was involved in e911 rollout, but at that time geolocation for 911 was very rough. We were doing this testing in Kansas (I was literally handed a map of every cell sector in the county and a script to read as I called into 911 a hundred times a day from each sector), but accuracy at best was within a block or two. I'm sure technology has improved since then, but the apt complex I live in now in NYC has 25,000 residents over 80 acres. My guess is the closest geolocation they'd get is to a cluster of a couple buildings, which could easily be close to 500 different residences.

jpollock 11y ago

If the house has previously had a landline it must be active for 911 service. You must be able to plug a phone in, pick it up and dial 911 - even without having dial-tone. 911 service from a landline is independent of having a paid account with the carrier. The same applies to cell companies - which is why you might see a "emergency calls only" flag in areas of poor service.

ipsin 11y ago
That's no longer true in California, unfortunately. It was a really nice feature for disconnected land lines, but the industry had the law changed. http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Consumer+Information/Changes+in+Calling+9-1-1+from+a+Traditional+Landline.htm http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Consumer+Information/Change...
- BEEdwards 11y ago
  Am I wrong or does that really seem like as much of a mustache twirlingly evil thing to do as I think? Can't have those poors making emergency medical calls until they pay what they owe.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    You think they actually bothered to hold a conscious image in their mind of the consequence of their actions, rather than just reasoning from "it costs us money" to "let's have our bought-and-paid-for legislators get rid of it"?
    - ipsin 11y ago
      Yeah, I'm imagining that the conversations were Entirely Reasonable. Something like, "the world is changing, people are moving off land-lines, and we can't be expected to maintain dead lines in perpetuity". The disgusting thing is, after this passed, the rates jumped about 50%. I was willing to pay under $20/month for land line service, but paying almost $30/month (for metered access, even for local calls!) was just too much. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/business/la-fi-lazarus-20130212 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/business/la-fi-lazar... "Since 2011, the California Public Utilities Commission has allowed phone companies to raise -- or lower -- basic phone rates whenever they choose, rather than seek approval from regulators. Since then, costs have steadily gone up." This, and the fact that the state now controls cable TV franchises, have left me pretty disillusioned with California government.

mcmillion 11y ago

If all the cellphones holders are not present and someone in the house needs 911, I'm fine with that, because that person shouldn't be in my house.

xigency 11y ago
You must not have seen the movie Home Alone.