FCC's Clyburn: Funding needed for Next Generation 911

Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn spoke at the National Emergency Number Association's 9-1-1 Comes to Washington Conference on March 29.

She said NENA's leadership will be vital in the implementation of the New and Emerging Technologies 9-1-1 Improvement Act of 2008. The goal of this federal statute is straightforward. We should migrate our current 9-1-1 networks to a national IP-enabled emergency network that can receive and respond to all citizen-activated emergency communications. She identified a number of challenges to migrating our 9-1-1 networks to a national IP-enabled emergency network:

• the current 9-1-1 system was never designed to receive calls and data from these new and emerging technologies and very few 9-1-1 call centers have the technical capability to receive texts, photos, videos, and other data;
• many 9-1-1 call centers do not even have access to broadband, which makes it difficult to receive large volumes of data; and
• since Congress wants this to be a national network, NG9-1-1 rolled out in a uniform, systematic way.

To meet these challenges, she said, we need money: "Absent appropriate action by, and funding for, States, Tribes, and local jurisdictions, there can be no effective 9-1-1 service."