Femtocells offer greater reception and convenience for cellular callers. But there are many problems to overcome regarding public safety and 911 calls.

What good is it to call for emergency help from a cell phone if dispatchers don’t know your location? North America’s 911 system is 40 years old and today sees about 40% of calls arrive through mobile phones. Industry groups and government agencies in the 1990s backed efforts to identify mobile call locations by using triangulation techniques and GPS identification chips. But just as that problem is easing, a new one is emerging with its own set of technical challenges – the home base station or femtocell.

The scope of identifying mobile call locations when routed through femtocells has the potential to be a major problem. Femtocell adoption will explode in the new few years and will be a major new source of revenue for carriers, hardware vendors and management software companies, yielding 70 million units shipped and serving 150 million users by 2012, according to ABI Research. Supporting software revenue will reach $360 million by 2013 because of advanced services, the research firm said. So it’s logical to address the location problem now while femtocells are just beginning to debut in the marketplace, than to backfill with patches and lawsuits after customer emergencies start to accumulate.

Tamaskar: Home base station convenience needs to overcome location ID challenges.

“As more and more people are moving toward mobile devices, there are more and more chances that people will be using those devices as their emergency phones. … Solving the location problem is very key,” said NextPoint Networks’ Natasha Tamaskar, vice president of product management and marketing.

NextPoint has a unique perspective because it makes gateways that receive femtocell signals. There are several specific problems and loopholes, Tamaskar said. Customers typically will keep a femtocell in one location, so emergency dispatchers can easily find its location – but while most femtocells today include a GPS antenna, only some include a battery in case of a power outage. Femtocell antenna ranges will increase in time, making it more likely that a caller could be far from the actual base station. Some brands of femtocells get network connections through broadband wired networks such as cable modems or DSL, so that brings up issues around packet prioritization – nobody wants to see a video download delay an emergency call. Femtocell owners also could take the device with them on business trips or vacation.  Another issue is call security; emergency calls should acquire stronger encryption than normal calls.

Those issues combined can make responders’ lives difficult and put victims’ lives in unnecessary danger. “This is really something that needs to be part of a standard as opposed to being proprietary,” Tamaskar noted.  As part of an industry group called the Femto Forum, NextPoint advocates an emerging standard called Iu-h, which the Forum hopes to complete and include in the latest batch of 3GPP standards by the end of this year. Customers need to understand that all femtocells available today deal with location in proprietary or pre-standard methods, she said.

There is some good news for carriers and femtocell developers. According to the FCC, finite goals exist. Since 1999, the FCC requires 67% of phones to have GPS accurate to within 100 meters and 95% accurate to within 300 meters. Handsets that do have GPS must be identifiable for 67% of the time within 50 meters and 95% within 150 meters, FCC spokesman Robert Kenny explained.

“They have to be able to meet those goals and we review those on an ongoing basis. Currently, all of the carriers are meeting those compliance requirements,” Kenny said.  Carriers can be financially penalized for not reaching the goals, as happened in 2005 with Sprint Nextel fined $1.3 million, Alltel fined $1 million and U.S. Cellular fined $500,000, he said.

Phillips: A femotcell technology standard would likely only be a Band-Aid.

Sprint is one of the few carriers dealing with femtocell calls right now. The company recently began shipping its $49.99 Airave (pronounced “Air Rave”) device in the greater Denver, Indianapolis and Nashville metropolitan areas and plans to announce expansion details this summer, officials said. But for Terrence Phillips, who as manager of network engineering is responsible for Sprint’s daily 911 operations, a femtocell technology standard would only serve as a Band-Aid. Customers simply should not expect landline-caliber service, he said.

“Since it’s wireless in nature, this device is acting like a wireless handset. This is not a wireless replacement product for us. Because this is a wireless product, you have the same coverage and the same issues you have with a wireless device. There is no difference from our perspective about what customers are getting for 911,” he said. Even callers not on the femtocell owner’s white list can still reach 911 as long as they use a CDMA phone and the femtocell has available bandwidth. “In a 911 environment, it overrides all normal controls,” he said.

“I think that this product will evolve into other iterations. When this goes into a more wireline replacement product, then how we handle it and how it’s structured from a 911 perspective will also have to change,” Phillips added.  “I envision having to go back and redefine the 911 solution at that point in time as they change the purpose and the way this product interfaces in the home.”

When location data is received by the emergency call centers, also known as public safety access points, there’s still go guarantee of accuracy, explained Terry White, vice president of RCC Consulting, which makes location testing software for carriers. Location signals can reflect off buildings or can reach the wrong call center because of natural borders and terrain or because of manmade obstacles like highways. And after the emergencies happen, carriers can inaccurately report data to the FCC because measurements usually come from national averages instead of regionally. For example, highly accurate data in a large city can mask dangerous coverage areas in rural regions. “Otherwise you’re going to end up with horror stories like we’ve experienced all over the country,” White said. “I don’t mean to berate the carriers at all because they’ve been very responsive to this.  In fact, the 911 system itself is probably far more lagging behind than anything.”

Cell Calls “A Mess” For 911 Director

Donald Elmer was not pleased to learn about femtocell technology and its problems. As director of the emergency communications center in Camden County, N.J., Elmer’s 100 agents already handle a half-million calls per year for 34 law enforcement agencies, 87 fire departments and all of the county emergency medical services. Calls come from residents of farms, suburbs and one of roughest inner-city environments in the nation. Almost 75% of all calls come from cell phones, he said. “The majority of the phones do not give us a location of where they are, only the cell towers of where they hit,” he said. “What can I tell you, it’s a mess. We would like to pinpoint it if someone’s in trouble. It does us no good if they’re locked in the trunk of a car and their cell phone tower comes up in the mapping.” “Very rarely do we have any GPS on where a person is actually calling from,” Elmer said. Cell phones are certainly convenient, he said – but still, “What the hell good are they if we don’t know where they’re calling from?”  However, the emerging femtocell technology can actually improve safety in the real world, said Patrick Halley, governmental affairs director of the National Emergency Number Association. In inner cities, where buildings are very close together, a femtocell can report a vastly more precise location than just the nearest cell tower.  So when responders arrive they would go to the right building or the right floor. Elmer agrees that technology should deliver useful answers to these problems. He would like to promise safety to local residents. But for now, he said, “There is none. It’s hit-or-miss at best.” —Evan Koblentz