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Yes, I think the real problem is #2. The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of

Yes, I think the real problem is #2. The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911. Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely don't have a way to automatically test these changes - or they might happen as part of other "features" (remember the Microsoft Teams bug that caused similar issues?). In the end, the smarter our smartphones become - the dumber they are at doing the one single thing they were initially meant to do - get help in case of an emergency.

philipov 3y ago
> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.
- denysvitali 3y ago
  A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments. Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure. To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy.
  - bleachedsleet 3y ago
    Linus Tech Tips has one complete with an isolated private 5G network inside. I’m sure Google could manage.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      Intrigued, looked up... hm. and am still wondering what they plan to do with that. 1: https://firecell.io/product/labkit/ https://firecell.io/product/labkit/
      - pests 3y ago
        They are building their "Labs" which aims to offer high quality testing. They also have purchased a professional power supply tester as well. They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways. Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
  - philipov 3y ago
    If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      It shouldn't be too expensive, but before you put in equipment and pretend to be the phone network, you need to make sure that you're hitting regulatory limits on the amount of RF leaking out. Doing a good enough job to hit that above a gigahertz--- including things like conducted RF, and validating with measurements-- is gonna cost a bit more than you describe.
      - evilduck 3y ago
        Fine, for permitting and regulations and inspections, let’s 100x the cost and say it’s an annual expense too. This is still well within Google’s budgets to provide to their Android teams.
        taway1237 3y ago
        This discussion is moot btw. Google already has faraday cage and bts equipment, at least in the London office (6ps) where a large part of the Android team is located. And obviously so - the costs involved are a rounding error for Google. The problem must be somewhere else.
      - numpad0 3y ago
        [1]. $1k, -95dB to 3GHz, in stock, manufacturer standard I/O plates sold separately. I think there's zero room for hypotheticals and challenges to talk about setting these up if you ask not webdevs but actual phone people. 1: https://jretest.com/product/jre-0912/ https://jretest.com/product/jre-0912/
  - 4RealFreedom 3y ago
    Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Even the dimmest view of management should expect them to care about extremely bad PR.
  - philipov 3y ago
    So how do you explain Unity and Reddit and Twitter and Wizards of the Coast all belly flopping their PR this year? I'm sure they care, in some abstract sense, about PR (well, not Musk). I just think they're out of touch and incompetent at dealing with it. Some of them are even on the record saying it will blow over and the benefits of not caring are worth the cost, like the Reddit CEO. Clearly the costs of bad PR aren't high enough.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      They care if bad PR results in less money. Wizards +Unity realized they pushed too hard and will ultimately cost them. Reddit thinks their decision still makes financial sense.
      - philipov 3y ago
        And Google is making exactly the same calculation. Maybe they'll do something to fix it after a hundred people die because they can't call 911 and it blows up nationally.
numpad0 3y ago
You don't need a full concert hall to test 911, the simplest LTE test equipment can be just couple sandwiches big. They're also not expensive at Google scale. It does concern me that there were anecdotal posts that read to me like that, developing firmwares and not blatantly violating basic assumptions and principles and core premises of Google MDM cannot occur simultaneously. If I somehow had to, I would bet that that to be on the path to the root cause. I mean, a lot of software jockeys have to be explained that IP address isn't assigned to a CPU socket.
- denysvitali 3y ago
  You need a special room as well - you can't accept that someone near your building might end up having his 911 call routed through your test infrastructure. Alternatively, I think you can somehow connect the device antenna to your equipment, so that the signal doesn't even have to be transmitted over the air (or at the scale of a femtocell). Still, rather "expensive" to setup in multiple locations for just a team that develops a dialer. Additionally, you'd have to test this across multiple OS versions, and devices. Still doable, but most likely not incentivized by the managers at Google
  - numpad0 3y ago
    I don't see why it would be expensive, for no other than Google, to set up a microwave oven with a factory rooted phone and a femtocell inside on ~dozen locations worldwide. There's no special legal or financial complexities in doing that. And selling phones that can't pass certification is just irresponsible. If you can't make a product work, you're free to be responsible and cancel a product. It's on Google to do businesses legally.
    - db48x 3y ago
      The faraday cage in a microwave is good for its purpose, but not good enough at blocking cell phone bands. They would need something slightly more expensive, anywhere from $1000 to $50k depending on how fancy they wanted to be. Of course Google should have no problem affording any of that, but these details do matter. I suspect that the problem must be more complex than a bug in just the phone or the OS; for one thing, the problem is intermittent and doesn’t affect every phone. Still, the lack of action from the FCC is disturbing.
zja 3y ago
> the only way to test is... to call 911 You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-The-933-service https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...
- snazz 3y ago
  Is that only a service that Bandwidth.com offers or would it work on a regular cell network?
  - zja 3y ago
    I think it depends on the carrier you use, but a lot of other carriers support it.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      I'm guessing pretty much all are carriers that are using Bandwidth.com for 911 service.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  I've been wondering how to test this, thank you
- bisby 3y ago
  Completely tangential to testing that the service connects: I have a young child and we've done practice "what do you do in an emergency" things, but are there any "fake 911" type services where a young child can call to practice a 911 call, so they can experience how the operator will talk to them, so in a real emergency it would be a bit less jarring?
- denysvitali 3y ago
  Okay, but that's not going through the same paths of a 911 call, is it? And by that I mean the emergency mode of the modems
yardstick 3y ago
I believe some places you provide emergency services the number you will be calling from to test, so they can handle it appropriately. Ultimately with a system like 911, you will always have to do final testing on the real deal. Because this is just too serious to get wrong.
radicaldreamer 3y ago
How does every other phone manufacturer do it then?

philipov 3y ago

> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.

denysvitali 3y ago
A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments. Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
- mlyle 3y ago
  Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure. To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy.
- bleachedsleet 3y ago
  Linus Tech Tips has one complete with an isolated private 5G network inside. I’m sure Google could manage.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Intrigued, looked up... hm. and am still wondering what they plan to do with that. 1: https://firecell.io/product/labkit/ https://firecell.io/product/labkit/
    - pests 3y ago
      They are building their "Labs" which aims to offer high quality testing. They also have purchased a professional power supply tester as well. They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways. Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
- philipov 3y ago
  If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
- evilduck 3y ago
  Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    It shouldn't be too expensive, but before you put in equipment and pretend to be the phone network, you need to make sure that you're hitting regulatory limits on the amount of RF leaking out. Doing a good enough job to hit that above a gigahertz--- including things like conducted RF, and validating with measurements-- is gonna cost a bit more than you describe.
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Fine, for permitting and regulations and inspections, let’s 100x the cost and say it’s an annual expense too. This is still well within Google’s budgets to provide to their Android teams.
      - taway1237 3y ago
        This discussion is moot btw. Google already has faraday cage and bts equipment, at least in the London office (6ps) where a large part of the Android team is located. And obviously so - the costs involved are a rounding error for Google. The problem must be somewhere else.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      [1]. $1k, -95dB to 3GHz, in stock, manufacturer standard I/O plates sold separately. I think there's zero room for hypotheticals and challenges to talk about setting these up if you ask not webdevs but actual phone people. 1: https://jretest.com/product/jre-0912/ https://jretest.com/product/jre-0912/
- 4RealFreedom 3y ago
  Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Even the dimmest view of management should expect them to care about extremely bad PR.
- philipov 3y ago
  So how do you explain Unity and Reddit and Twitter and Wizards of the Coast all belly flopping their PR this year? I'm sure they care, in some abstract sense, about PR (well, not Musk). I just think they're out of touch and incompetent at dealing with it. Some of them are even on the record saying it will blow over and the benefits of not caring are worth the cost, like the Reddit CEO. Clearly the costs of bad PR aren't high enough.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    They care if bad PR results in less money. Wizards +Unity realized they pushed too hard and will ultimately cost them. Reddit thinks their decision still makes financial sense.
    - philipov 3y ago
      And Google is making exactly the same calculation. Maybe they'll do something to fix it after a hundred people die because they can't call 911 and it blows up nationally.

numpad0 3y ago

You don't need a full concert hall to test 911, the simplest LTE test equipment can be just couple sandwiches big. They're also not expensive at Google scale. It does concern me that there were anecdotal posts that read to me like that, developing firmwares and not blatantly violating basic assumptions and principles and core premises of Google MDM cannot occur simultaneously. If I somehow had to, I would bet that that to be on the path to the root cause. I mean, a lot of software jockeys have to be explained that IP address isn't assigned to a CPU socket.

denysvitali 3y ago
You need a special room as well - you can't accept that someone near your building might end up having his 911 call routed through your test infrastructure. Alternatively, I think you can somehow connect the device antenna to your equipment, so that the signal doesn't even have to be transmitted over the air (or at the scale of a femtocell). Still, rather "expensive" to setup in multiple locations for just a team that develops a dialer. Additionally, you'd have to test this across multiple OS versions, and devices. Still doable, but most likely not incentivized by the managers at Google
- numpad0 3y ago
  I don't see why it would be expensive, for no other than Google, to set up a microwave oven with a factory rooted phone and a femtocell inside on ~dozen locations worldwide. There's no special legal or financial complexities in doing that. And selling phones that can't pass certification is just irresponsible. If you can't make a product work, you're free to be responsible and cancel a product. It's on Google to do businesses legally.
  - db48x 3y ago
    The faraday cage in a microwave is good for its purpose, but not good enough at blocking cell phone bands. They would need something slightly more expensive, anywhere from $1000 to $50k depending on how fancy they wanted to be. Of course Google should have no problem affording any of that, but these details do matter. I suspect that the problem must be more complex than a bug in just the phone or the OS; for one thing, the problem is intermittent and doesn’t affect every phone. Still, the lack of action from the FCC is disturbing.

zja 3y ago

> the only way to test is... to call 911 You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-The-933-service https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...

snazz 3y ago
Is that only a service that Bandwidth.com offers or would it work on a regular cell network?
- zja 3y ago
  I think it depends on the carrier you use, but a lot of other carriers support it.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    I'm guessing pretty much all are carriers that are using Bandwidth.com for 911 service.
waveBidder 3y ago
I've been wondering how to test this, thank you
bisby 3y ago
Completely tangential to testing that the service connects: I have a young child and we've done practice "what do you do in an emergency" things, but are there any "fake 911" type services where a young child can call to practice a 911 call, so they can experience how the operator will talk to them, so in a real emergency it would be a bit less jarring?
denysvitali 3y ago
Okay, but that's not going through the same paths of a 911 call, is it? And by that I mean the emergency mode of the modems

yardstick 3y ago

I believe some places you provide emergency services the number you will be calling from to test, so they can handle it appropriately. Ultimately with a system like 911, you will always have to do final testing on the real deal. Because this is just too serious to get wrong.

radicaldreamer 3y ago

How does every other phone manufacturer do it then?