Posted on 06/04/2021 4:20:58 PM PDT by algore
Calling 9-1-1 in the United States (and many other countries) sends the caller’s location to emergency services, so the dispatcher can send assistance as quickly as possible.
However, the location data isn’t perfect — most notably, it doesn’t include the caller’s vertical location, an important factor in taller buildings.
The three major carriers in the US have now agreed to start providing vertical location data for 911 calls, though it might be a while before the data can be used by emergency services.
The FCC first announced in 2015 that carriers would be required to start sharing vertical location data. The original deadline was June 2nd, 2021, but AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon wanted an 18-month extension (allegedly due to issues testing the functionality during the COVID-19 pandemic).
With the deadline rapidly approaching, the FCC began an investigation in April to find out what was taking carriers so long.
All three major carriers have now agreed to start providing vertical location data to 911 call centers within the next seven days, and each company will pay a $100,000 settlement.
(Excerpt) Read more at xda-developers.com ...
Vertical location in buildings....
Origin may have been when Hunter Biden set off a small fire with a crack pipe in a hotel room, called 911 and had to answer he was “high” and then passed out. Now they can triangulate how high.
What if I’m in an open pit mine?
Or I’ve fallen into a sink hole?
They ahve already been doing this for years and years. They can ping the nearest tower. Have been doing it forever for general location.
Right, but the way 5G works, it has to know your location in 3-dimensions in order to shape the beam it uses to communicate with your phone. That’s a big part of how it gets 10 times as many connections, and each of those at higher speed, as 4G. Side-lobes, but on purpose.
If your cell phone talks to the tower, it can point down there too.
“They ahve already been doing this for years and years.”
Nope.
Hmmmmmmmm?
Crowd sourcing the bandwidth network around you... Yep.
Sure they have, not tight GPS location but to the nearest tower you are using. Not much use in most cases but your phone sits and pings your location to the 911 system about every 15 minutes if it is on.
They can use a combination of triangulation, GPS, barometric pressure and wifi networks that your phone sees...
I already get spam calls from the 40th floor of an open cornfield.
Are you sure?
“Sure they have,”
Since LTE and previous signals had NO vertical information it was impossible for them to transmit vertical info on 911 calls.
And 5G points a beam at each phone, and measures a distance so it can tune signal strength.
here, you see examples with 2 beams, but 5G can direct up to 50,000 of them from an array, each beam with left/right/up/down precision. Each beam is tuned to have a certain power level at a certain distance, so it calculates the distance based upon delay as well. It knows where your phone is within a few cm whenever it establishes a call, and within a few meters generally. When you move to another cell, there is no drop, because that exact location is passed on to the other cell, and that cell establishes a beam to the same point.
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