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Quick! Your partner has just keeled over and isn't breathing! Give me your latitude and longitude! Your phone probably knows what your lat/long are, but can yo

Quick! Your partner has just keeled over and isn't breathing! Give me your latitude and longitude! Your phone probably knows what your lat/long are, but can you quickly look it up in a high-pressure situation? Probably not. And emergency call systems such as 911 don't get that information either. Maybe they will in ten or twenty years, but they don't now.

BorgHunter 12y ago
E911 in the U.S. does include lat/lon when it comes from a cell phone, accurate to within 50-300 meters. It's part of the FCC guidelines, phase II, which went into effect at the end of 2005. https://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services https://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services
- JshWright 12y ago
  That is surprisingly less useful than you might think... There can be a _lot_ of residences in a 300 meter circle.
fennecfoxen 12y ago
Mmm, iPhone > Compass gives it to me easily, though it uses the obnoxious degree-minute-second format and only tells me within a second of arc (on the order of 30 meters, depending on the part of the earth's surface you're on -- at least as good as many verbal directions). If easy reliable access to that information is really the main barrier, it does suggest an alternative.
- dfc 12y ago
  Lets assume that everyone owns an iphone (because that is reasonable): What happens when you sustain an injury that has impaired your vision? I call emergency services and tell them my address or the address at the person's house I was working at. What are you going to do?
JshWright 12y ago
That's not entirely true... E911 Phase II capable call centers (which is more or less all of them, per FCC mandate) will receive GPS coordinates from cell phone calls. This works well for things like traffic accidents, where the caller may not know exactly where they are, but if you know the rough location, they're pretty easy to find (just look for the smashed up cars...). It is a _lot_ less useful for a caller inside a house. We occasionally get dispatched to a geolocated address when a baby-sitter or some other visitor who doesn't know the house number calls from their cell phone. Unfortunately, even with the best accuracy available, it's still anybody's guess which house they are actually in (even in a suburban area, there can be several residences within the geolocation radius). If they can get outside to flag us down, great. If not, it's a lot of knocking on doors until you find the right place...

BorgHunter 12y ago

E911 in the U.S. does include lat/lon when it comes from a cell phone, accurate to within 50-300 meters. It's part of the FCC guidelines, phase II, which went into effect at the end of 2005. https://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services https://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services

JshWright 12y ago
That is surprisingly less useful than you might think... There can be a _lot_ of residences in a 300 meter circle.

fennecfoxen 12y ago

Mmm, iPhone > Compass gives it to me easily, though it uses the obnoxious degree-minute-second format and only tells me within a second of arc (on the order of 30 meters, depending on the part of the earth's surface you're on -- at least as good as many verbal directions). If easy reliable access to that information is really the main barrier, it does suggest an alternative.

dfc 12y ago
Lets assume that everyone owns an iphone (because that is reasonable): What happens when you sustain an injury that has impaired your vision? I call emergency services and tell them my address or the address at the person's house I was working at. What are you going to do?

JshWright 12y ago

That's not entirely true... E911 Phase II capable call centers (which is more or less all of them, per FCC mandate) will receive GPS coordinates from cell phone calls. This works well for things like traffic accidents, where the caller may not know exactly where they are, but if you know the rough location, they're pretty easy to find (just look for the smashed up cars...). It is a _lot_ less useful for a caller inside a house. We occasionally get dispatched to a geolocated address when a baby-sitter or some other visitor who doesn't know the house number calls from their cell phone. Unfortunately, even with the best accuracy available, it's still anybody's guess which house they are actually in (even in a suburban area, there can be several residences within the geolocation radius). If they can get outside to flag us down, great. If not, it's a lot of knocking on doors until you find the right place...