14 ms·

This has happened several times over the past couple of years in Belgium as well. Bugs and mishaps happen, and I'm sure the systems were designed to be fault to

This has happened several times over the past couple of years in Belgium as well. Bugs and mishaps happen, and I'm sure the systems were designed to be fault tolerant. But perhaps it's time to stop relying on POTS alone for emergency numbers? Is there any particular reason we can't reach emergency services over the internet? Even something as banal as Skype or Facetime would make for a decent backup.

roywiggins 7y ago
Internet outages have a nasty habit of knocking out modern 911 infrastructure... https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-internet-911-outage-fcc-investigating https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-int...
londons_explore 7y ago
Emergency services are apparantly too important to allow something as 'unreliable' as skype/facetime. I don't understand why regulators can't drop the reliability requirements and understand that if skype, facetime, whatsapp, viber, twitter, etc. all have 99.9% reliability, then the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down. Just have a #911Emergency official hashtag and have a bunch of people reply to it. That's the way the people want it.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Last time the power went off in Amsterdam, the internet continued to work just fine.
  - FabHK 7y ago
    POTS is not dependent on the ordinary house electric system, either.
    - lmm 7y ago
      It's not supposed to depend on the ordinary electrical system. In practice that independence isn't always tested as often as it should be, and mistakes happen.
      - FabHK 7y ago
        True, but at least it is supposed to. What about "the internet"? Which parts of that will still work when there's a power outage? Not your home Wifi, presumably. Mobile data? For how long?
        Piskvorrr 7y ago
        Tens of minutes on average. Most BTSes are battery-backed, without generators. (Home wifi could work, but the usefulness of an island system is limited. Outer link also worked last time, but what good is that when the other end is not even on UPS? Next hop was optical, but who knows how that is powered and whence.)
        ascorbic 7y ago
        How many people have their home wifi on a UPS?
        lmm 7y ago
        > What about "the internet"? Which parts of that will still work when there's a power outage? Not your home Wifi, presumably. Mobile data? For how long? The true-but-unhelpful answer is "depends on your ISP and what contract you have with them". A typical home user's "last mile" is almost certainly less reliable than POTS, agreed. But if you make it onto the backbone the internet is better at routing around disruption than the circuit-oriented phone system. So I wouldn't want to count on the phone system always being more reliable.
    - iagovar 7y ago
      It is, we just use batteries. Anyway I'm no expert of that, I just see batteries when I enter a BTS, but never checked if there was a separate power line or anything. I'm talking about one ISP in Spain though.
- felipelemos 7y ago
  You really don't want any one in the internet flooding your #911Emergency hashtag. I can understand Skype and WhatsApp having some kind of official emergency option, but not a hashtag on Twitter.
- zaxomi 7y ago
  Internet outages happens too often for any internet based services to be reliable in an emergency. Any larger ISP have several local outages per week. Last week one of the largest mobile carries in Sweden had major problems three days in a row, affecting both telephone and internet.
- FabHK 7y ago
  1. POTS aims at "5 nines" reliability. [1] 2. > the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down. That depends crucially on the correlation. If there are common fault modes (such as: internet down), the probability might be way higher. (Remember, it used to be common wisdom that it was possible that one or two home owners won't be able to pay their mortgages, but the probability that many will be unable to pay their mortgages is so low that all these MBS and CDO's can be rated AAA...) 3. EDIT to add: Of course, adding communication options can only increase the probability that you can reach your emergency provider, but there's a reason that Skype etc. used to come with these big disclaimers that they're no replacement for POTS, namely the excellent reliability of POTS. [1] "Although POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Re...
  - slfnflctd 7y ago
    This is exactly the reason why I find all the gleeful tearing out of old POTS copper lines very distressing. This was a proven system with incredible reliability, which worked in power outages for residential users due to centralized backup systems, and still has plenty of usefulness. Until we come up with some universal multi-layered standards which provide at least the same level of uptime and utility, it seems more than a little premature to pull all of it up as a matter of course. Obviously in many places there are space constraints, but that is not usually an issue in arguably the most important use case, at home.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    Better that Five nines - experiencing a major switch failure should be something you experience once every two or three generations.
    - 7y ago
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Perhaps because in an emergency there may not be enough time for someone to sign up for and install Skype?
  - fwip 7y ago
    I can't go out and buy a phone in the middle of an emergency either.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    I believe they meant the new communication as an additional option, not a replacement. It's not "now I have to install Skype", it's "the normal phone line is dead, I've got an emergency, now I've got an option to try Skype instead of possibly just dying".
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      If that's the case, they shouldn't be using the possibility of using skype as an excuse to reduce the availability requirements for getting ahold of 911
      - viraptor 7y ago
        I hope that londons_explore meant dropping reliability requirements on the supporting tech so it can be added, not on the POTS itself.
- oneplane 7y ago
  That's what they did when 112 went down, they just started accepting twitter/instagram/facebook/whatsapp. Problem is that those services can be much harder to manage making them a problem in itself (i.e. spoofing, overloading).
- walshemj 7y ago
  We are talking about a countries 911 service going down and killing people and you suggest a lower (3 nines) services as a better replacement oh and a back up of a *f&^ing Hashtag! Having the Dutch government nationalise the 911 service with no compensation to the share holders would be a start.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Wait... Astrid isn't a POTS. And it's going to be phased out and normal cell networks is going to be used during the transition. https://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_reseau-astrid-20-ans-de-communications-et-quelques-couacs?id=10035290 https://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_reseau-astrid-20-ans-...
- Tharkun 7y ago
  Astrid isn't POTS, but it is a POS. /snark What I was trying to say was that users are only able contact emergency services through POTS (and, by extension, GSM, obviously). The fact that operators and emergency services use Astrid was sort of beside the point. Although I do believe the last major outage was because of Astrid.
btown 7y ago
POTS = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service for those unfamiliar with the acronym.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
POTS is dead in Europe for most countries.
kyshoc 7y ago
The main challenge is reliably localizing callers to the right 911 dispatch... without allowing anyone to spoof their origin, and without inadvertently allowing location data to leak out to non-emergency calls (or texts, or tweets, or whatever emergency medium this scheme would support).
- Tharkun 7y ago
  I doubt that. That's a very critical feature for a small subset of emergency calls, where the victim is the one making the call and is unable to communicate their location. But in the majority of cases, something as simple as a text message like "armed robbery at $address" or "fell down stairs at $location" should suffice. Maybe that would increase the number of prank calls, but maybe that's worth the price.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    You overestimate human rationality in emergency situations. Last time I was calling for an ambulance, I had a hard time giving my own damn home address, and I've been living here for decades.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Callers never talk to dispatchers. Call takers take reports and provide information to dispatchers.
  - rob-olmos 7y ago
    For smaller towns (one I know of being a population of ~6k) callers speak with the dispatcher.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      I guess it varies from place to place. A lot of small town police departments are dispatched from a larger center. In those set ups, one dispatcher will be in charge of dispatching a channel, which represents a geographical area with a certain number of units working at any particular time. Their job is to read reports coming in, ask any questions they have to the call taker, and coordinate all units on their channel. It’s a very hectic job, and an emergency call can easily take more than 30 minutes to complete. They have to be coordinating units constantly, if you’re getting more than one call concurrently, there’s no way a dispatcher could do both.
ptaipale 7y ago
It's the other way round: POTS is still the most reliable thing we have. The "intelligent" services in call and dispatching centers are what fail. The more the telephony services are mingled with Internet, the more they are exposed to both Internet security threats and bungle-ups created when applying the various patches and updates that are made necessarily by the constant stream of security updates. Plain POTS has less of that.
- Nuzzerino 7y ago
  This is spot on IMO. It's true that if you put enough quality and maintenance into a system, it can stay at ~100% uptime. But very few organizations have those kinds of resources, and government systems tend to not be funded more than they need to be, and generally aren't staffed with state of the art tech teams. But it's not unreasonable to imagine the possibility that this can change in the future, if the cost and risk for maintaining such a system were to decrease below a certain threshold.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    Why can't we have redundancy? Internet-based and telephone-based emergency services.
    - ptaipale 7y ago
      We can, we should and in some countries we do, but the increasing reliance of POTS services on internet technology make them vulnerable to the same weaknesses that exist in the internet.
    - zaxomi 7y ago
      Redundancy cost money, and most companies do not want to pay for it. I work for a company with about 40 employees. Our offices are connected to two different ISPs: one by optical fiber and one by VDSL. We have two different telephone operators for our outgoing calls from the offices, and I have two mobile phones with different operators. During the last five years there have been multiple outages that lasted between minutes and days, but most of the times the redundancy have saved us. But when we lost power (the whole city went dark for hours) we went down when the batteries in the UPS was drained. Having our own generators is too expensive.
warp_factor 7y ago
I have also always wondered what would I do if I have an emergency and I only have access to internet, not to a traditional phone line. Is there even 911@police.com? or some type of service that can be reached like that? I'm sure this must have happened a lot in the past. Seems the most reliable would be to ping a friend over internet so he can call the emergency services
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Local police departments very often have social media presence After that you have people you know will be available to come to where you are, email or im After that you have people you know will answer like your manager, the front desk at work, even filing a support ticket at work, the whole goal being getting the attention of someone who knows you
- eric_the_read 7y ago
  In some (relatively limited, I believe) areas in the US, you can text 911: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/what-you-need-know-about-text-911 https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/what-you-need-know-abou...
Tsubasachan 7y ago
Emergency services need to hear your voice and background noise in order to determine what exactly is going on.
dahfizz 7y ago
Internet outages are much more common than phone outages. Having two independent systems available would be ideal, but governments would never go for that. It's better to rely on the phone network.
rdeboo 7y ago
My girlfriend works as a GP. One of her colleagues was on a visit and had to call an ambulance. She was able to do so by reaching out to the police via Facebook.. (not sure how the address was communicated and what the privacy impact is of that)

roywiggins 7y ago

Internet outages have a nasty habit of knocking out modern 911 infrastructure... https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-internet-911-outage-fcc-investigating https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-int...

londons_explore 7y ago

Emergency services are apparantly too important to allow something as 'unreliable' as skype/facetime. I don't understand why regulators can't drop the reliability requirements and understand that if skype, facetime, whatsapp, viber, twitter, etc. all have 99.9% reliability, then the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down. Just have a #911Emergency official hashtag and have a bunch of people reply to it. That's the way the people want it.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Last time the power went off in Amsterdam, the internet continued to work just fine.
- FabHK 7y ago
  POTS is not dependent on the ordinary house electric system, either.
  - lmm 7y ago
    It's not supposed to depend on the ordinary electrical system. In practice that independence isn't always tested as often as it should be, and mistakes happen.
    - FabHK 7y ago
      True, but at least it is supposed to. What about "the internet"? Which parts of that will still work when there's a power outage? Not your home Wifi, presumably. Mobile data? For how long?
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        Tens of minutes on average. Most BTSes are battery-backed, without generators. (Home wifi could work, but the usefulness of an island system is limited. Outer link also worked last time, but what good is that when the other end is not even on UPS? Next hop was optical, but who knows how that is powered and whence.)
        ascorbic 7y ago
        How many people have their home wifi on a UPS?
      - lmm 7y ago
        > What about "the internet"? Which parts of that will still work when there's a power outage? Not your home Wifi, presumably. Mobile data? For how long? The true-but-unhelpful answer is "depends on your ISP and what contract you have with them". A typical home user's "last mile" is almost certainly less reliable than POTS, agreed. But if you make it onto the backbone the internet is better at routing around disruption than the circuit-oriented phone system. So I wouldn't want to count on the phone system always being more reliable.
  - iagovar 7y ago
    It is, we just use batteries. Anyway I'm no expert of that, I just see batteries when I enter a BTS, but never checked if there was a separate power line or anything. I'm talking about one ISP in Spain though.
felipelemos 7y ago
You really don't want any one in the internet flooding your #911Emergency hashtag. I can understand Skype and WhatsApp having some kind of official emergency option, but not a hashtag on Twitter.
zaxomi 7y ago
Internet outages happens too often for any internet based services to be reliable in an emergency. Any larger ISP have several local outages per week. Last week one of the largest mobile carries in Sweden had major problems three days in a row, affecting both telephone and internet.
FabHK 7y ago
1. POTS aims at "5 nines" reliability. [1] 2. > the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down. That depends crucially on the correlation. If there are common fault modes (such as: internet down), the probability might be way higher. (Remember, it used to be common wisdom that it was possible that one or two home owners won't be able to pay their mortgages, but the probability that many will be unable to pay their mortgages is so low that all these MBS and CDO's can be rated AAA...) 3. EDIT to add: Of course, adding communication options can only increase the probability that you can reach your emergency provider, but there's a reason that Skype etc. used to come with these big disclaimers that they're no replacement for POTS, namely the excellent reliability of POTS. [1] "Although POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Re...
- slfnflctd 7y ago
  This is exactly the reason why I find all the gleeful tearing out of old POTS copper lines very distressing. This was a proven system with incredible reliability, which worked in power outages for residential users due to centralized backup systems, and still has plenty of usefulness. Until we come up with some universal multi-layered standards which provide at least the same level of uptime and utility, it seems more than a little premature to pull all of it up as a matter of course. Obviously in many places there are space constraints, but that is not usually an issue in arguably the most important use case, at home.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Better that Five nines - experiencing a major switch failure should be something you experience once every two or three generations.
  - 7y ago
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Perhaps because in an emergency there may not be enough time for someone to sign up for and install Skype?
- fwip 7y ago
  I can't go out and buy a phone in the middle of an emergency either.
- viraptor 7y ago
  I believe they meant the new communication as an additional option, not a replacement. It's not "now I have to install Skype", it's "the normal phone line is dead, I've got an emergency, now I've got an option to try Skype instead of possibly just dying".
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    If that's the case, they shouldn't be using the possibility of using skype as an excuse to reduce the availability requirements for getting ahold of 911
    - viraptor 7y ago
      I hope that londons_explore meant dropping reliability requirements on the supporting tech so it can be added, not on the POTS itself.
oneplane 7y ago
That's what they did when 112 went down, they just started accepting twitter/instagram/facebook/whatsapp. Problem is that those services can be much harder to manage making them a problem in itself (i.e. spoofing, overloading).
walshemj 7y ago
We are talking about a countries 911 service going down and killing people and you suggest a lower (3 nines) services as a better replacement oh and a back up of a *f&^ing Hashtag! Having the Dutch government nationalise the 911 service with no compensation to the share holders would be a start.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Wait... Astrid isn't a POTS. And it's going to be phased out and normal cell networks is going to be used during the transition. https://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_reseau-astrid-20-ans-de-communications-et-quelques-couacs?id=10035290 https://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_reseau-astrid-20-ans-...

Tharkun 7y ago
Astrid isn't POTS, but it is a POS. /snark What I was trying to say was that users are only able contact emergency services through POTS (and, by extension, GSM, obviously). The fact that operators and emergency services use Astrid was sort of beside the point. Although I do believe the last major outage was because of Astrid.

btown 7y ago

POTS = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service for those unfamiliar with the acronym.

the_mitsuhiko 7y ago

POTS is dead in Europe for most countries.

kyshoc 7y ago

The main challenge is reliably localizing callers to the right 911 dispatch... without allowing anyone to spoof their origin, and without inadvertently allowing location data to leak out to non-emergency calls (or texts, or tweets, or whatever emergency medium this scheme would support).

Tharkun 7y ago
I doubt that. That's a very critical feature for a small subset of emergency calls, where the victim is the one making the call and is unable to communicate their location. But in the majority of cases, something as simple as a text message like "armed robbery at $address" or "fell down stairs at $location" should suffice. Maybe that would increase the number of prank calls, but maybe that's worth the price.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  You overestimate human rationality in emergency situations. Last time I was calling for an ambulance, I had a hard time giving my own damn home address, and I've been living here for decades.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Callers never talk to dispatchers. Call takers take reports and provide information to dispatchers.
- rob-olmos 7y ago
  For smaller towns (one I know of being a population of ~6k) callers speak with the dispatcher.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I guess it varies from place to place. A lot of small town police departments are dispatched from a larger center. In those set ups, one dispatcher will be in charge of dispatching a channel, which represents a geographical area with a certain number of units working at any particular time. Their job is to read reports coming in, ask any questions they have to the call taker, and coordinate all units on their channel. It’s a very hectic job, and an emergency call can easily take more than 30 minutes to complete. They have to be coordinating units constantly, if you’re getting more than one call concurrently, there’s no way a dispatcher could do both.

ptaipale 7y ago

It's the other way round: POTS is still the most reliable thing we have. The "intelligent" services in call and dispatching centers are what fail. The more the telephony services are mingled with Internet, the more they are exposed to both Internet security threats and bungle-ups created when applying the various patches and updates that are made necessarily by the constant stream of security updates. Plain POTS has less of that.

Nuzzerino 7y ago
This is spot on IMO. It's true that if you put enough quality and maintenance into a system, it can stay at ~100% uptime. But very few organizations have those kinds of resources, and government systems tend to not be funded more than they need to be, and generally aren't staffed with state of the art tech teams. But it's not unreasonable to imagine the possibility that this can change in the future, if the cost and risk for maintaining such a system were to decrease below a certain threshold.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Why can't we have redundancy? Internet-based and telephone-based emergency services.
  - ptaipale 7y ago
    We can, we should and in some countries we do, but the increasing reliance of POTS services on internet technology make them vulnerable to the same weaknesses that exist in the internet.
  - zaxomi 7y ago
    Redundancy cost money, and most companies do not want to pay for it. I work for a company with about 40 employees. Our offices are connected to two different ISPs: one by optical fiber and one by VDSL. We have two different telephone operators for our outgoing calls from the offices, and I have two mobile phones with different operators. During the last five years there have been multiple outages that lasted between minutes and days, but most of the times the redundancy have saved us. But when we lost power (the whole city went dark for hours) we went down when the batteries in the UPS was drained. Having our own generators is too expensive.

warp_factor 7y ago

I have also always wondered what would I do if I have an emergency and I only have access to internet, not to a traditional phone line. Is there even 911@police.com? or some type of service that can be reached like that? I'm sure this must have happened a lot in the past. Seems the most reliable would be to ping a friend over internet so he can call the emergency services

colechristensen 7y ago
Local police departments very often have social media presence After that you have people you know will be available to come to where you are, email or im After that you have people you know will answer like your manager, the front desk at work, even filing a support ticket at work, the whole goal being getting the attention of someone who knows you
eric_the_read 7y ago
In some (relatively limited, I believe) areas in the US, you can text 911: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/what-you-need-know-about-text-911 https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/what-you-need-know-abou...

Tsubasachan 7y ago

Emergency services need to hear your voice and background noise in order to determine what exactly is going on.

dahfizz 7y ago

Internet outages are much more common than phone outages. Having two independent systems available would be ideal, but governments would never go for that. It's better to rely on the phone network.

rdeboo 7y ago

My girlfriend works as a GP. One of her colleagues was on a visit and had to call an ambulance. She was able to do so by reaching out to the police via Facebook.. (not sure how the address was communicated and what the privacy impact is of that)