FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION

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E911 COORDINATION INITIATIVE

Commission Hearing Room

Federal Communications Commission

445 12^th^ Street SW

Washington, DC 20554

Thursday, October 30, 2003

9:15 a.m.

GOVERNORS\' DESIGNEES PRESENT:

Craig Allred (DC)

Evelyn Bailey (VT)

Phil Bates (UT)

John Benson (IA)

Col. Jerry Bussell (NV)

Clay Chan (HI)

Randy Daniels (NY)

Laura Demman (NE)

Peter DeNutte (NH)

Paul Fahey (MA)

Doug Friez (ND)

Albert E. Gervenak (ME)

Brian Grimm (WY)

Jenny Hansen (MT)

Anthony Haynes (TN)

Stan Herrera (AK)

Bill Hitchens (GA)

Barbara Jaeger (AZ)

Ken Keim (OR)

Raymond LaBelle (RI)

Paul Mallet (TX)

James Martin (FL)

Steve Marzolf (VA)

Robert Oenning (WA)

John Patterson (KY)

Ken Peterson (Navajo Nation)

George J. Pohorilak (CT)

R.D. Porter (MO)

Craig A. Reiner (NJ)

Daphne Rhoe (CA)

Richard Taylor (NC)

Kristi Turman (SD)

Gary Underwood (AR)

Jim Walker (AL)

Derek White (Gila River Comms.)

Mark Whitlock (DE)

Scott Whitney (MD)

OTHER PANELISTS PRESENT:

Kathleen Abernathy

Jonathon Adelstein

Mike Amorosa

Greg Ballentine

Eugenie Barton

Bobby Brown

Bill Cade

Ed Cameron

Gregory Cooke

Bob Currier

Charles Davidson

Drew Dawson

Tim Duffy

Michael Fischel

Wayne Gasaway

Jim Goerke

Jeff Goldthorp

Kyle Gruis

John Healy

Allen Holder

Connie Hughes

Bob Johns

David Jones

David Koon

Karl Korsmo

Richard Leicht

Ken Lowden

George Marble

Kevin McCracken

John McMillan

Stephen Meer

Susan Miller

Jackie Mines

John Muleta

Jonas Neihardt

Jim Nixon

Gustavo Pavon

Ernie Peterson

Nancy Pollock

Scott Pomerantz

Jack Potter

Michael K. Powell

Arthur Prest

Jeff Robertson

Ray Scheppach

Catherine Seidel

K. Dane Snowden

Richard Taylor

Congressman Fred Upton

Jim Wickham

Jerry Wilke

I-N-D-E-X

Opening Statement by K. Dane Snowden,

Chief, Consumer and Governmental Affairs

Bureau 5

Presentation by Mr. Lowden,

Indiana Wireless E911 Advisory Board 15

Introduction of Bobby Brown

Wireless Telecommunications Bureau 27

Remarks by Commissioner Adelstein 42

Presentation by Jerry Wilke,

Hickory Tech Wireless 47

Presentation by Allen Holder,

Lincoln City, West Virginia PSAP 62

Presentation by Jackie Mines, Qwest 69

Presentation by Kyle Gruis,

Rural Cellular Corporation 76

Presentation by George Marble,

Andrew Corporation 99

Presentation by Art Prest,

RFB Cellular and Alpine PCS 112

Presentation by Mike Amarosa,

TruePosition 122

Presentation by Richard Taylor,

North Carolina Office of Information

Technology Services 127

Presentation by Ed Cameron,

Rural Utility Services 134

Remarks by Jeff Goldthorp,

Office of Engineering and Technology 139

Presentation by John Healy,

Office of Engineering and Technology 140

Presentation by Gustavo Pavon,

TruePosition on Behalf of ESIF 160

Remarks by Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy 176

Presentation by David Jones,

Director Emergency Services,

Spartanburg, South Carolina 178

Presentation by Dr. Jack Potter,

ComCARE Alliance 183

Presentation by Jeff Robertson,,

CML Emergency Services 201

Presentation by Craig Allred,

U.S. Department of Transportation 207

Presentation by Scott Pomerantz,

Global Locate 212

Presentation by Stephen Meer,

Intrado 215

Presentation by Jonas Neihardt,

Qualcomm 221

Presentation by Mike Amarosa,

TruePosition 224

Final Remarks and Adjournment by John Muleta,

Chief, Wireless Telecommunications Bureau 231

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

9:16 a.m.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Good morning. My name is Dane Snowden, and I would
like to introduce myself. I am the Chief of the Consumer and Government
Affairs Bureau here at the FCC. I want to welcome you to the second day
of the Commission\'s Second Wireless Enhanced 911 coordination
initiative. That\'s a lot of seconds in there. It is my distinct
pleasure to be here and to extend a special welcome to the
representatives from state and tribal governments from across the
country. We appreciate your interest and the time and the resources you
have expended to come to be with us here in Washington today. We\'re
also happy that the sun has come back out, which makes a lot of us
happy.

I also want to welcome the members of the public safety community, and
representatives of the wireless industry, the equipment manufacturing
industry, and the location-based technology industry. Your participation
is key and very much appreciated.

As everyone here knows, wireless E911 is a complex issue. Successful
deployment requires the coordination and cooperation of wireless
carriers, LECs, the public safety community, equipment manufacturers,
and technology vendors. To facilitate this coordination and cooperation,
in April of this year, the commission convened the first E911
Coordination Initiative. The April meeting raised many key topical
issues and resulted in a positive exchange of information.

This second initiative contains, in that vein, and takes us a step
further in solving some of the key questions. However, our focus is not
just to eliminate the issues, but also to identify possible solutions
through interactive discussions with our collective expertise. As
Chairman Powell said yesterday, the FCC wants to move from an era of
cooperation to an era of accomplishment to an era of achievement.

Today the agenda will discuss four key issues. The first, consumer
issues, the second, E911 deployment issues affecting rural carriers, and
the third, technical issues and the fourth, the future of public safety.
In each instance, following the forum presentations, we\'ll allow for
questions and answers.

Our goal today for all of the panels, for all of the discussions, is to
have a lively debate an a frequent exchange of information going back
and forth. Again, on behalf of Chairman Powell and the Commissioners, I
would like to welcome everyone here and thank you again for joining us
today.

Now, I would like to turn to our first panel on consumer issues. This
morning I am joined by Mr. Ken Lowden, who is the Director of Steuben
County, Indiana Communications, who will discuss consumer outreach in
the State of Indiana. He will be followed by MR. Bobby Brown, from the
FCC\'s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, who will give you an update
on deployment status, electronic filing of quarterly reports, and the
FCC issued reports on E911 matters. We will take questions from the
audience as I said earlier.

I will kick off the panel with a discussion on the FCC\'s consumer
outreach initiatives. Oftentimes when contemplating the wireless E911
issue, we focus on how complex the issue is, and how it requires a
coordinated role-out by all stakeholders, wireless, wire line, public
safety, technology manufacturers, and vendors. Sometimes in the
important technical and legal discussions that take place, we ignore the
obvious, which is that wireless E911 is at it\'s core, a consumer issue.

The number of 911 calls placed by people using wireless phones has more
than doubled since 1995 to over 50 million a year. Public safety
personnel estimate that about 30 percent of the many millions of 911
calls they receive daily are placed from wireless phones, and that
percentage is only growing. With the transition of wireless service from
a luxury service to a necessity, consumer expectation about the features
and functions of their wireless phone has only increased. While wireless
phones are an important public safety tool, they also create unique
challenges for public safety and emergency response personnel and for
the wireless service providers.

The success of E911 in the wire line context has raised consumer
expectations, meaning American consumers are used to wire line enhanced
911, and they expect the same capabilities for their wireless
telephones. This elevated expectation makes it impossible for consumers
to appreciate some of the limitations of wireless phones and wireless
E911. Consumers are expecting the wireless phones to work like their
hard wire phones in their homes, but we, all of us here, we all know
their safety may be directly affected by how much they know about
wireless E911. This is exactly why consumer awareness is essential.

Collectively we have made great progress toward meeting consumers\'
expectations. Phase one of wireless E911 is well underway and the
nation\'s largest wireless service providers are deploying phase two. As
we all know, however, we are not there yet. Because wireless 911
locations information will not be available everywhere immediately, it
is important for consumers calling 911 from wireless phones to know the
advantages and the limitations they can expect when making that call.
Thus, the FCC, through the Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau, is
engaged in a strategic deliberate and targeted consumer outreach
campaign. The overarching purpose of the campaign is to educate
consumers about the advantages and challenges of wireless E911, as well
as what they can expect from the wireless carriers right now.

For example, our consumer fact sheet on wireless 911 services provides
consumers with a checklist of what they should tell an emergency
response call taker when making a 911 call from their cell phone.
Specifically, we inform them to tell the emergency operator the location
of the emergency right away.  Give the emergency operator his or her
wireless phone number so that the operator can call back if the call is
unexpectedly disconnected. Use designated non-emergency numbers to get
help in non-life-threatening situations to avoid unnecessary calls to
emergency services, and, of course, refrain from programming wireless
phones to automatically dial 911 when one button, such as the nine key,
is pressed to avoid unintentional 911 calls.

We have also provided consumes with basic information about the
Commission\'s 911 rules, which wireless services are subject to the
rules, and how the rules operate. This type of information is conveyed
through the campaign. The Commission\'s E911 consumer vision targets
reaching consumers through key consumer audiences. First, consumers and
public interest organizations such as the Consumer Federation of
America, the Consumers\' Union, the National Association of State
Utility

Consumer Advocates, and the National Association of Consumer Agency
Administrators. Second, organizations representing specific consumer
constituencies such as AARP, NAACP, LaRaza, and the National Association
of the Deaf, and third, key organizations representing state, local, and
tribal governments, including the National Governors Association, the
National Conference of State Legislators, NARUC, the U.S. Conference of
Mayors, the National League of Cities, the National Congress of American
Indians, and of course, the State Governors and Tribal Designees.

In partnership with these key organizations, we are working to educate
their members about wireless E911, but we know we cannot do it alone.
Finally, we are using a number of outreach tools to engage the key
stakeholder organizations. The Commission has long used the Web as a way
to make information available to consumers. The FCC maintains a site
devoted to the issue of wireless E911 to make it easy for those with an
interest to find information on the worldwide Web. In addition, the
Commission\'s fact sheets on wireless 911 services and communicating
during emergencies are available on the FCC\'s Web site. We are looking
at other ways in which we can improve our E911 presence and the
usefulness of those sites as an informational clearing house for
consumers.

In addition to making information available on the Web, the Consumer and
Government Affairs Bureau also will use direct mailings to consumer
organizations and key consumer constituencies to reach consumes with
information about E911. Our outreach materials include consumer fact
sheets, consumer advisories, and relevant FCC publications such as the
popular, What You Should Know About Wireless Telephones\". We design our
publications to address issues or questions that we learn of from
consumers in the course of our outreach and calls to our consumer
centers.

The FCC staff have participated in many conferences and workshops hosted
by the public safety community and we plan to do more, and we found that
these are an effective means of getting information to consumers. We
look for opportunities to participate in conferences of consumer
organizations and key stakeholder groups, so please keep us in mind as
we move forward. In addition, we take our FCC exhibit booth to as many
conferences as possible and use the opportunity to talk with consumers
on a one-on-one basis. We have our own traveling road show we like to
say.

For example, we recently participated in the LaRaza Conference,
addressed the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators. We
have also discussed the wireless E911 issue with the National
Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, the National Congress
of American Indians, and several disability rights organizations which
play a key role in this as well.

Working in cooperation with public safety and industry partners, we are
exploring the possibility of developing an online E911 training session.
The training session would be hands-on training tool aimed at providing
information about wireless E911 to specific target audiences to help
them understand the differences between basic 9111 and E911. I think I
had one too many ones in that last one. Wire line and wireless E911 and
the current state of wireless E911 deployment \-- a lot of ones in that.

As you can tell, the FCC has developed a comprehensive strategy of
reaching out to the American consumer on this critical issue.  We
believe that through the combination of our direct outreach efforts and
our partnership with key stakeholder groups, public safety
organizations, and state and local and tribal governments, we can make
sure that consumers are fully informed about this issue. After all, E911
is an issue for and about consumers.

If there are any questions for me, I would be happy to take them. If
not, I would like to go directly to our first panel. Yes, ma\'am?

MS. JAEGERS: Barbara Jaegers, State of Arizona. (Question posed by
off-microphone audience member.)

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: That is an issue that we\'re looking at now. It\'s
too early for me to say exactly what or if we\'re going to do anything,
but that is an issue that has been teed up here at the Commission.

MS. JAEGERS: (Off-microphone)

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Well, that would be asking \-- you\'re asking me to
make a policy decision right here on the stage, and I don\'t think I
would do that today. I have a mortgage, I have a car payment, and I like
my job, and I\'m not going to get ahead of my chairman on that
particular issue.

MS. JAEGERS: (Off-microphone)

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: I will say that it\'s an issue that has been teed up
before the commission and we\'re looking at it currently.

MS. JAEGERS: Thank you.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Any other questions that don\'t put my job in
jeopardy? It was a fair question. You had the chairman here yesterday.
That was a question for him.

MS. JAEGERS: (Off-microphone)

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Well, with that, thank you very much for your
question. Are there any other questions? Well, thank you.

I would like to introduce Mr. Kenneth D. Lowden, who is Director of
Steuben County, Indiana Communication who is a fellow Hoosier. Kenneth
served as director of the Steuben County, Indiana Communication Center
for the past 14 years and has been involved in public safety
communication for more than 19 years. He is a past president of Indiana
NENA, holding several positions within the organization. He was NENA\'s
representative and lead negotiator in drafting and lobbying for
Indiana\'s wireless E911 legislation. Upon passage of the legislation,
Ken was appointed by Governor frank O\'Bannon to the Indiana Wireless
E911 Advisory Board and serves as the board\'s vice-chairman. He is also
a member of NENA, APCO, and several other local fraternal and civic
organizations. Ken?

MR. LOWDEN: Thanks Dane. It\'s always good to be introduced by a fellow
Hoosier. As Dane said, I serve as the Vice-Chairman of the Indiana
Wireless 911 Board, and I\'m pleased to be here today to represent our
board chairman and state treasurer, Tim Berry. As many of you know,
Treasurer Berry has been committed to wireless 911 and serves throughout
the country on various APCO and NENA, NENA SWAT initially and
unfortunately he could not be here today, so I\'m going to pinch it for
him this morning.

All of us gathered here today obviously have one thing in mind, and
that\'s to forward the E911 wireless phase one and phase two at all
levels. It involves not only people like myself that\'s in the local
level, but it involves the wireless carriers, it involves the FCC, it
involves a lot of other groups. It also requires a lot of experience, a
lot of expertise, and as you all know, E911 is not rocket science, but
it also remains complicated and at many times is a convoluted
undertaking.

You can imagine how the consumer feels. As consumers we\'re overloaded
with information coming from the newspapers, from TV, from radio,
Internet, and most of us, or many of us, are very numb to this and
ignore an awful lot of things that we do. It\'s no different when it
comes to 911 or even all telephones in general. When we first
contemplated this public awareness, public outreach campaign in the
State of Indiana, I have to admit we were really a little naive on how
we were going to do this. We thought, just throw the information out to
the public, they\'ll take it, they\'ll run with it, they\'ll understand,
no problem, it\'s a pretty simple process. Well, I really wish it was
that easy, because we were pretty naive.

There were several issues that we took in the State of Indiana to talk
about the development in our public awareness of this campaign, and I\'d
like to discuss those issues with you this morning.

The introduction of 911 as the universal emergency number was
accomplished by an intense education and awareness effort nationwide.
Let me state the very obvious. It worked. People have been conditioned,
they expect to know where you\'re at when you dial 911 on a land-line
telephone, and they expect the very same thing in most cases from their
wireless. It\'s a tiny bit of peace of mind in an emergency situation
that the consumer expects.

Number two, this is not a criticism of the wireless industry, but rather
a reality of the environment. Wireless carriers find themselves in a
very intense, hyper-competitive marketplace trying to distinguish
themselves from each and every other wireless carrier, they work on
pricing, calling plans, phones, features, and all those kinds of things,
however, wireless carriers sell consumers on the warm and the fuzzy. The
intimacy of communication, parents staying in touch with their kids at
home, at college, friends staying in touch with one another without
annoying parents, and other things, the mobility, the ease, the comfort
of wireless communications.

Consumers\' perception of all this given points one and two, naturally a
consumer would expect the peace of mind that every call they make will
get 911 and someone will be able to locate them and find them and
provide them with whatever emergency service that they want.

The last thing that we dealt with in our campaign was, how to fight
through the overload of information. With more information delivered, it
is an interesting way to compel us consumers will pay attention, take
action, adjust the way they think. It was not an easy task for a
well-funded effort, let alone one undertaking with a limited budget.

With those issues in mind, we developed a public awareness campaign in
the spring of 2002 and 2003. We recognized early on that we did not have
the expertise to complete this by ourselves. We brought in a public
awareness, public relations firm to help us develop this program, and
develop a concise message to effectively communicate this to the public.
Creating a concise yet meaningful message was somewhat of a difficult
prospect. Remember there are very many different well-established
perceptions in place in respect to 911. The ability to get in touch with
anyone, anywhere, at any time.

In addition, there was no villain. We did not intend to beat up the
wireless carrier. We did not want to beat up public safety. The message
boiled down to safety and information, inform consumers of the benefits
and unfortunately, limitations of wireless phones in an emergency in
minutes can mean the difference between life and death, and many of us,
they run PSAPs, can certainly relate to that.

But we thought we also needed a partner. We needed someone to help us
communicate this message. A partnership with an organization that had a
solid reputation, credibility, a mission consistent with our efforts,
and organization that could share some of the financial burden, and
quite honestly, we found that and much more in the American Heart
Association. The American Heart Association has an impeccable
reputation, provided the campaign with instant and incredible
credibility. Their mission and efforts complement what we wanted to do
and the information we wanted to get to the consumer.

We also recognized that due to our limited budget, that we immediately
ruled out television and print. In working with a public relations firm
and EMMIS Communications \-- EMMIS, by the way, is the flagship station,
WIBC in Indianapolis, Indiana, it has a network throughout the State of
Indiana, it\'s a news provider throughout to many, many stations in the
State of Indiana. We successfully developed radio spots effectively
communicating the basic message in 60 seconds.

In a turn of events, we were able to secure the perfect person to help
deliver our message, and bring additional profile to our message. That
person was Sam Hornish, Jr., a championship-winning Indy race car driver
and how appropriate for the State of Indiana.

What I would like to do real quick is I have two spots that I would like
to play for you, of our radio spots that we had, if I can get the mouse
to work.

RADIO AUDIO 1:

911, what\'s your emergency?

Ma\'am, I have this incredible pain in my chest. I think I\'m having a
heart attack.

Sir, what is your location?

I don\'t know. I don\'t know. I don\'t know where I am. I don\'t \--

Sir, you\'re on a cell phone and it\'s not the same as your home phone.

It\'s pitch black out here. Oh, the pain is spreading to my shoulder.
Oh, my God, am I going to die?

Sir, stay with me. I\'m going to need your help to find you.

ANNOUNCER: Your cell phone coverage area, and your 911 coverage area,
are not the same. To find out if your carrier provides 911 emergency
coverage, log on to 911coverage.org. That\'s nine, the numbers one, one,
coverage dot org. Do not call 911 to find out your coverage. Simply log
on to 911coverage.org. From the American Heart Association and the 911
Wireless Board, 911coverage.org. In an emergency, every minute matters.
Can your cell phone save your life in an emergency?

RADIO AUDIO 2:

MR. HORNISH: This is Sam Hornish, Jr. Winning the Indy racing league
championship two years in a row takes teamwork and communication. On the
racetrack I rely on my spotters and crew to tell me whenever there is a
yellow flag because they know everyone\'s location on the track. Being
able to locate danger is a key to winning, and to my safety.

MR. BERRY: That\'s right, Sam. Unfortunately, if you\'re not a race car
driver, you don\'t have spotters and a crew. I\'m Indiana Wireless 911
Board Chairman and State Treasurer Tim Berry. People buy wireless phones
with the expectation of safety and security. What if a loved one
suffered a heart attack or was in a car accident, needing emergency help
when every minute matters. Could a wireless phone save their lives? Only
if emergency workers can locate them. Find out more and ask the right
questions when buying a wireless phone. Visit our Web site,
911coverage.org. Indiana is at the front of the pack for new technology
that can help save lives, but there\'s still a long race ahead with very
high stakes. Stay in the race. Visit 911coverage.org. Be safer. Be
informed.

MR. LOWDEN: That\'s the two \-- we actually did four spots, or four
radio commercials, each of them 60 seconds in length, and that\'s two of
the four. While the radio spots deliver a fair amount of information, we
recognize that there need to be another way to get the information out,
and also other information had to accompany the message that we were
trying to do in our spots, and thank goodness for the Internet. We
develop our Web site that you heard on the radio spots. It\'s an
inexpensive medium. We have information on there concerning each
carrier. We have which counties in fact deployed with Phase One and
Phase Two, and we also have our radio spots and much other information
on there, so you\'re certainly welcome to go to our Web site which is
www.911coverage.org.

Obviously timing was also very important.  We launched our month-long
campaigns obviously during the Indianapolis 500 and the Memorial Day
weekend, which is obviously a small little racing event that we have in
the State of Indiana. It\'s a traditional kick-of in the State of
Indiana for summer travel, and for most people that are going. WBIC is
the flagship station for the Indianapolis 500, it has pull days, it\'s
the biggest station for pull day broadcasting all over the world. So we
maintained a strong presence on WBIC and the Indiana network for the
entire month of May, up to and including the race.

Last but not least, I\'d like to talk about some free and actually media
that we in Indiana were able to generate during this public awareness
campaign, and I\'d like to think it\'s solely due to the compelling
nature of the message we deliver, the story that we tell. Certainly
that\'s part of it, but a huge reason is State Treasurer Tim Berry. In
Indiana, we have a unique ability to draw attention to our efforts
because of a statewide elected official. I believe we are the only state
in the United States that has a statewide elected official as chairman
of our E911 wireless board. He is our face, he is our state spokesman
for the media that we can turn to. We\'ve been effective in leveraging
his face, his message, his information, because he made numerous trips
throughout the State of Indiana during that month. Our state treasurer
continues to make trips on a regular basis throughout the State of
Indiana, talking about 911. Every time we have a new deployment in a
Phase Two situation, or even in Phase One, Chairman Berry was out there
doing press conferences all over the state.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn\'t briefly talk about Indiana\'s
PSAPs. To date, we have, as a wireless board, we have disbursed over
\$35 million to the PSAPs for the Phase One and Phase Two efforts. In
addition to the customary uses for wireless 911 funds, Indiana\'s
statute allows specifically for PSAPs to use the money for public
awareness and information. I\'m also happy to tell you that 70 of 90
counties in the State of Indiana presently have Phase Two with at least
one wireless carrier. So Indiana is certainly long on its way to
becoming 100 percent state in Phase Two.

The challenges are many, the resources are few, and the need is great.
Education is critical and we\'re happy to be leading the effort in the
State of Indiana. Again, thank you to the Commission, thank you, Dane,
for this important gathering, and with that, I\'d be happy to answer any
questions anybody would have. Yes?

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off-microphone.)

MR. LOWDEN: You know, to be honest with you, Dave, I don\'t know that we
have that information. I know that we were talking about trying to get
that, but I don\'t know if we ever did it. We do know that as we travel,
Chairman Berry has said that, you know, people are talking about it.
They\'ve heard it, and of course, in Indiana during the month of May
when you have the lead station doing the race, I mean, it was just on
everywhere. Yes?

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ken, how much of a financial investment was
there?

MR. LOWDEN: I don\'t know. I\'ll have to ask Chris. Where are you at?
I\'m not sure. Chris actually \-- our executive director actually put
the financials together and quite honestly, the Board, we approved the
whole entire package, but I don\'t remember exactly how we put that
together. I\'d be more than happy to get it for you, but \--

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who owns the Web site? You\'ve got a great one
there.

MR. LOWDEN: That\'s ours, the State of Indiana Wireless Board, and I
will tell you this, we\'re willing to try to work with anybody if, you
know, if we want to figure out something to \-- how we make that, you
know, to everybody, we\'re willing to \-- you know, we don\'t think we
need to hog that if you will, because it is a good site, the name.

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, we do a similar thing, but ours is tied
in behind (inaudible).

MR. LOWDEN: Yeah, this goes right straight to the \--

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible.)

MR. LOWDEN: Yes, Gary?

UNMIKED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ken, can you give any advice to all of us here
about how you started the relationship with the non-profit organizations
and why you chose them, and how it worked?

MR. LOWDEN: Actually, we were here in Washington actually with a meeting
with NENA and Steve Seits and they introduced us to the American Heart
Association, and the local office said, you know, we\'re looking for
something like this, and they put us in touch with the Indiana chapter
or the Indiana office. Boy, I tell you what, they were more than
enthusiastic to join us, and quite frankly, we didn\'t even look for
anybody else because they were so excited about, you know, getting that
message out with us.

MR. LOWDEN: Thank you.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Thank you very much, Ken. It was very insightful and
it\'s always good to always share a stage with a fellow Hoosier. It is
my pleasure now to introduce to you all Mr. Bobby Brown, who is a
program analyst for the data management division of the Wireless
Telecommunications Bureau, he of the FCC. Mr. Brown is the project
manager of the wireless bureau\'s Internet Web site, he has served at
the Commission since April of 1995, after retiring from the United
States Air Force. So welcome very much, soldier, or airman.

MR. BROWN: Good morning, everyone. Okay. As I said, good morning,
everyone. My name is Bobby Brown. I just wanted to say quickly that my
primary job is working on the wireless Web site, so I\'m happy to see
all of the handouts and all that good stuff that you were given when you
came in, and I would like to make a pitch that if you see something
that\'s of value, let us know. If you see something that you would like
to see that\'s not there, let us know that too, and I\'ll quickly throw
out wtbweb@fcc.gov is an e-mail box that comes to me and we can talk to
you about your suggestions.

I\'m here today to talk to you about the basically deployment status,
electronic filing of quarterly reports, and the FCC issued reports. Back
in April, John Muleta, our bureau chief, talked to the first gathering
about goals for a database that would help the public in tracking E911
deployment. The goals he mentioned to us at that time were more accurate
and efficient tracking of deployment, a greater ability to rapidly
identify trends and barriers, especially on a geographic basis, more
data available to the public, and additional guidance to assist carriers
in filing those reports.

One of the things we wanted to accomplish is the stakeholder cooperation
that\'s involved in this effort to collaboration and coordination
between all these entities that have to deal with this process. SS many
of you know, back in June of this year, we issued a public notice giving
carriers instruction on filing their quarterly reports, starting with
the August reports. That included an additional Excel spreadsheet that
we defined fields for, and gave instructions on how to fill it out. This
spreadsheet we are going to sue for a database which, of course, will
give you better and more accurate information, and that\'s where this
cooperation is heading, to give accurate, reliable data that\'s in a
consistent format that we\'ve already identified.

Also, we want to go to a place where we\'re giving consistent terms. In
our PSAP registry, we want to make sure that the PSAP ID\'s flow with
everything, the information that you\'re providing, the carriers are
providing to the government. Also that the deployment statuses that
you\'re giving, everyone understands what those words mean and give that
information accurately. We have started working with NENA and the states
to obtain accurate PSAP lists to facilitate that. This, of course, will
lead to accurate, relevant reports, statistical reports, that we can
post to our Web site and you will have, of course, access to.

We\'ve had some successes. The August 1st report was the first time we
started this, of course, and for the most part, the carriers were \--
they did a great job in providing the information that we wanted in the
format that we requested, and we were really happy to see that. The
August 1st reports did indicate that we had significant Phase Two
deployment progress in the states that are mentioned here. Many of the
states were mentioned in the Chairman\'s remarks yesterday.

Also, over 80 percent of the Phase One requests made were completed and
over 50 percent of the Phase Two requests were completed.

We also had some challenges. As I mentioned briefly before, the PSAP
registry, we were \-- we had found that they were \-- the listing was
over-inclusive, meaning that many of the entries that we had PSAP ID
numbers for were not people that actually took calls, so that\'s going
to be \-- have to be something we have to resolve, so that it skews the
percentages when you look at deployment versus requests.

Electronic filing, we found that a lot of carriers had trouble with our
Excel spreadsheet, meaning the specific instruction that we gave for
filing it out was not followed, which required us to do manual entries,
a kind of a back and forth thing that really wasn\'t something that we
thought was necessary, but because we didn\'t get the information in the
correct format, we had to do that. So we want to stress that that\'s
something we really need to make sure of, is that the carriers give us
the information in the format that we gave to them, and we are happy to
work with you if that\'s going to be a problem for them.

Exception reports are reports that we will send to the carriers which
specify what these specific problems are and then we can start that back
and forth that needs to happen, and of course, the reason that we have
not as of yet posted our FCC reports to the Web site is because we\'re
still working the data, scrubbing the data, making sure that we have
accurate and reliable information before we post anything.

What\'s next? First of all, we need to work with NENA, the states, to
clean up or correct discrepancies, resolve issues on the PSAP registry
so we have the best information for the carriers to use in order to send
back to the government with their own information. The November 1st
electronic filings are almost due, so we\'re going to use those filings
and go th rough this process that I just explained to get good
information that\'s relevant to you, and get that on the site. These
exception reports will be the dialogue that we use, the back and forth,
to the carriers to make sure that we resolve all the issues and all the
problems.

At that time, when we have got the good data and looked at it, and
decided what relevant reports we are going to deliver, we will deliver
those reports and post them on the FCC\'s Web site. I\'ll be happy to
answer any questions you have. Yes?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Can I ask you a favor? Go to the mic. We want to
make sure that our folks who are watching this on the Web can actually
hear.

MS. BAILEY: I\'m Evelyn Bailey. You mentioned that you were going to be
working with the states to make sure that the information that you have
for us is accurate. Could you elaborate on when and how that\'s going to
take place? I notice you gave us a report in the packages of information
that you left for us yesterday. Is that something that we\'re supposed
to check and return to you?

MR. BROWN: Lauren, I don\'t know what instruction was given with those
handouts that you gave.

MS. PATRICH: I\'m trying to think of the right quip, but you figured it
out.

MR. BROWN: Good.

MS. PATRICH: Yes. We handed out a list of the PSAPs as we know the list,
in each state, to each of the designees as they came in, and we intended
to follow up after the meeting, once we saw how the meeting went, on a
number of things where we wanted to keep a running dialogue with the
governors\' designees and obviously the first thing we need to do was
clarify, is this the right list of PSAPs and which of these take calls,
which of these actually take 911 calls. That will help us narrow down to
primary PSAPs on our list. That\'s exactly where we\'re going with this.
Thank you, Evelyn, for bringing it up.

MR. OENNING: Well, thank you. You\'re the ones that are going to walk
around and talk. I\'ve got piles of them here. This is a little bit off,
and I don\'t know who wants to answer it, but one of the things that
we\'re faced with in the states, and I think nationally, is getting
decent data to work with on some of the trends for the future, and it\'s
very critical to us as we\'re going out there working with politicians
or just projecting budgets, and I just wonder how the FCC if they\'ve
looking forward toward issues such as the migration from wire line to
wireless and getting to the one place, the FCC getting us some numbers
we could work with that would give us some idea of their projection of
what happens, and then as it does occur, some information on that,
because that\'s going to affect our tax base, it\'s going to affect many
things. I\'d like to see that, as long as \-- as well as just simple
wireless growth projections, because, you know, we get those from all
over, they\'re very fragmented, each carrier does their own, and getting
\-- and with churn figured in who knows what they are, and I\'d like
someplace to get some data that projects reasonably reliable or at least
looks backward on all of these issues so we could go to legislators and
say, here\'s what we we\'re looking at a year from now or two years from
now.

MR. BROWN: Good Question. I don\'t know the answer to your question.
What we can do from my perspective is, one of the things we need to hear
from you folks is just what you said, is what reports do you need, and
are we gathering the information that we need to answer your questions,
and that I don\'t know. If there\'s someone else that can answer this
\--

MS. PATRICH: Was there \-- I\'ll go ahead and answer what I know of
that, and one thing we are certainly are in the business of industry an
analysis, and you may, if you haven\'t already, looked at it, want to
take a look at our annual CRMS competition report that analyzes the
state of the industry on a yearly basis. It comes out usually in the
summer, and in fact, we just released one a couple of months ago. I
think it\'s the eighth annual, so you do have a series of reports you
can look at to see how we have analyzed where the CRMS industry is
going. So we certainly are analyzing what has happened. I\'m not sure we
will ever be in a business of predicting what\'s going to happen to the
extent that you really need it, Bob, but \--

MR. GROSH: Yeah, and then I might mention though if you\'re asking about
data on wireless growth, there is information on that. The CTIA, the
trade association for the wireless industry, the Cellular
Telecommunications and Internet Association, has data tracking growth in
wireless subscribers and calls and also 911 calls on their Web site,
www.wow-com.com. I\'m not sure just the specific page, but they have
information that will allow you to at least see what the history has
been of wireless calls and 911 calls.

MR. BROWN: And if you go to the Wireless Bureau\'s home page on the left
side of the navigation, you\'ll see the competition reports. You can
click there and get it.

MS. SEXTON: Elaine Sexton from Georgia, and I have a question concerning
as far as the deployment information you were using, what constitutes
deployment as far as these reports are concerned, and also where does
that information come from?

MR. BROWN: The information comes from the carriers, but \-- go ahead.

\` MS. SEXTON: That answers my question.

MS. PATRICH: Yes, the information that we have comes from the reports
that are filed quarterly by the carriers.

MS. SEXTON: I can assure you that Georgia is a long way from being
ready. We certainly don\'t have significant Phase Two quarterlies.

MS. PATRICH: Well, then that\'s something we should talk about off-line.

MS. SEXTON: Good.

MR. BROWN: Thank you.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: AS you can tell, there are many areas and many ways
to look at the challenges that we\'re facing when it comes to
deployment, et cetera, and I think the more information that the
Commission has at its fingertips, the issue of how do we track the
numbers, where do we get the numbers from, those are all great questions
to bring to our attention, particularly if there are discrepancies and
so if there are other issues that we need to be aware of, if you\'re not
comfortable saying it to the larger group, please pull someone from the
FCC aside and let\'s have that dialogue so that we can get on the right
path to make sure that we pull all parties together to insure that we
have successful deployment across the board.

I think that the \-- as you can tell, we\'re starting with the consumer
as we look at these issues, because ultimately the consumers are the
ones who use and need this service so desperately, and I think the \-- I
want to thank our two panelists who joined me here today for their good
work highlighting some good examples of how this can be done to get
information out to the American public. So again, I thank both of you,
and I thank all of you for your time, so thank you guys.

MR. BROWN: Thank you.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Before we break though, I did want to ask. Are there
any other questions that \-- or any success stories or challenges that
some other states may have encountered that would be helpful for the
larger group to be aware of, or for example, some of the carriers that
are in the room. If you have any stories that you would like to share
for us to be aware of, as well, to a larger group. Everyone is shy and
bashful this morning, I see. Don\'t let the room intimidate you. Yes,
sir. If you could just go to a microphone so we can have someone \--

MR. HOBSON: I\'m Jim Hobson. I\'m here on behalf of NENA this morning,
and while I pull away from the mic a moment to pull this out, I just
wanted to indicate that by a happenstance of good luck here, we have a
NENA news publication dedicated to 911 public education. We should have
had these out on the tables this morning, we realized in hindsight, but
we\'re going to work to get an electronic version of the stories here,
some of which are the kinds of anecdotes that you are looking for, Dane,
and make this an augmentation to the record of this gathering, if that
suits the folks that are pulling together the record. So, a NENA issue
on 911 public education we will extract that and make it available to
you in a convenient format.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: We greatly appreciate that. In addition to the
publications that we just heard about, if anyone has comments or
thoughts or suggestions on the publications that we are creating or our
Web sites that we are creating here at the FCC, please let us know.
Please let us know if they\'re useful. Please let us know if they\'re
not useful, because we don\'t want to keep doing something that\'s not
worthwhile, and we believe that we\'re going in the right direction, but
there is always room for improvement no matter what we do here at the
Commission, so please keep us in mind as you look for these
publications, and as you need more please feel free to give us a call
and let us know, and we will gladly share this information for free
sending it out to any of the states or any consumer organizations, oi
any of the carriers for that matter, who would like to have this
information. So, any other questions? With that, we\'re a little bit
ahead of schedule which is probably a rare thing around here. So, we\'re
ahead of schedule and \-- excuse me. Oh, there\'s a question. I\'m
sorry.

MR. OENNING: Hi there. Bob Oenning from the State of Washington. I
thought I would make a comment for some of the states that haven\'t been
through this just because we have. It was mentioned earlier that 911,
how getting materials can be difficult. It can also be very easy. If you
do a press release, or you do materials or you do something, or you have
an outage and you use EAS system to tell people about the outage, and
it\'s a dull news day, 911 jumps to the very top and you get all the
tracks, so it does jump to the top of people\'s notice if there\'s not
something big out there, and even then we always get it, so you\'ve got
to really think through how you\'re going to do these things, because
they can jump up and bite you unless you\'re kind of careful about it,
and we do it on a regular basis.

For instance, when we have outages, we go on EAS and tell people there
are outages and tell them what to do if there\'s a 911 outage. Part of
that is, my public information officers are ready to go because the news
people arise and they start asking questions. So it can easily be
something that you get PR on, but you\'ve got to be a little careful
because you will get it.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Sounds like being aggressive is a good tactic.

MS. MITCHELL: Good morning. My name is Helena Mitchell, and I\'m from
Georgia. I\'m the director of a program that deals with disabilities and
we particularly focus on the wireless area, so I would ask those of you
that are working in the field of emergency communications, to also
consider the disability community out there when you\'re working on it.
I was also former chief of the Emergency Broadcasting System here at the
FCC, and the first chief of the emergency alert system, and one thing we
found was that there is not enough services going to those communities
and of course, we know from past experiences the criticalness of making
sure all of our citizens are safe. Thank you.

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Thank you, and she was not a plant since she used to
work here at the FCC. Did I miss anyone that wanted to have an
opportunity to speak?

THE WITNESS: With that, we\'re going to take our break a little early,
and we will resume at 10:45 with Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. Thank
you.

(Whereupon the foregoing matter went off the record at 10:08 a.m. and
went back on the record at 10:46 a.m.)

MODERATOR SNOWDEN: Well, I hope everyone enjoyed a very good break and
you were able to get to know and meet some new friends. We\'re going to
move along with the agenda and keep moving forward. Next up is \-- of
course, we\'re going to start talking about rural E911, and it is my
distinct pleasure to introduce to you all someone I\'m sure everyone
here knows, but nonetheless, I enjoy having the opportunity to say,
welcome and thank you to Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein for joining us,
and he will be your moderator as we go forward. So ladies and gentlemen,
Jonathan Adelstein.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thank you, Dane. We had a really great day
yesterday looking over all the different components of E911, and looking
back over the agenda, it\'s just amazing the group of people we had, and
again today, we have a remarkable group who has come from all over
America, and all over rural America, to share their perspectives from
all different aspects of this. So we\'re really turning to an issue
today that is so important to me personally, having been born and raised
in rural America, in South Dakota, and that so many of us in this room
the deployment of E911 services to rural areas. As we\'re going to hear
today, there\'s a lot of big challenges facing rural deployment.

At the same time that we have these enormous challenges, it\'s also
especially crucial that we get it right for rural areas because critical
response time is just so important in the wide open spaces that we have
in rural areas, and the lack of proximity to emergency response means
that it\'s all the more important that we get the right information to
responders as quickly as we can, because we all know about the golden
hour, that one hour after an accident or some kind of trauma, that it\'s
so critical that we get emergency responders to the person and those
improved response times can really lead to I think fewer cases of death,
and in the case of injury, that those injuries will be less severe or
that the problems can be treated more quickly resulting in fewer
disabilities, so we\'ve got to take advantage of that. We\'ve got to get
rural America every bit as wired as the rest of the country, or as
wireless as the rest of the country, on E911 services. So hopefully
today we\'re going to hear some stories about how folks are working to
make emergency response better and faster throughout rural America.

We\'ve got a really full session today, which reflects, I think, the
importance of this issue. We have three separate panels, and
participants in the roundtable that have been kind enough to join us
here, so it may require a little movement around the table because the
roundtable shifts a little from panel to panel, but we\'ll \-- we\'re
going to keep it moving and not take a break until 12:45 for lunch.

We\'ll first spend about 40 minutes on stakeholder cooperation issues,
then we\'ll turn to a discussion of location technologies for about 30
minutes or so, and then the remaining hour we\'ll talk about the market
challenges faced by PSAPs and wireless carriers in rural areas.

I\'m going to ask the presenters to make their presentations and we can
field a few questions if people want to immediately after those
presentations, and then after the final presentation, we can open the
floor for questions. I\'ll encourage the roundtable participants to dive
right in and participate equally in the discussion, whether asking
questions or answering them. I want this to be a real dialogue if we can
make it that way.

Our first panel touches on shareholder cooperation issues, as I said,
and will likely introduce a lot of the themes that will be addressed in
the subsequent panels. We hope to learn about the ways different
stakeholders cooperate, or maybe in some cases, how they don\'t
cooperate. But we will continually hear about the improvements that are
taking place in stakeholder cooperation and that\'s essential, I think,
to achieving more rapid achievement of E911 deployment. The expectations
of the local community and the capability of the care to deliver E911
services should come together, I think, through cooperation and
communication, and that\'s what we\'re here today to try to promote.

So if there\'s problems out there, we want to hear about possible
solutions as well.

Before we start up, why don\'t we go ahead and go around the round table
maybe, and if you can give us your name and who you\'re with and where
you\'re from, because we have people from all over the country on the
roundtable, and I\'d also like to remind folks before you ask questions,
if you wouldn\'t mind just saying who you are, so that we can get that
right in the transcript that\'s going to come out of today\'s
discussion. So, if you would begin, George.

MR. MARBLE: I\'m George Marble. I\'m with the Andrew Corporation and
I\'m based in Ruston, Virginia.

MR. NEIHARDT: Thank you. Jonas Neihardt with Qualcomm Incorporated and
Qualcomm is based in San Diego, California.

MR. CADE: Bill Cade with APCO International with offices in Daytona
Beach and Washington, D.C.

MR. PETERSON: Good morning. I\'m Ken Peterson. I represent the Navajo
Nation situated in Window Rock, Arizona. The Navajo Nation is situated
in three states, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Thank you.

MR. DUFFY: I\'m Tim Duffy, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice
President with Dobson Communications out of Oklahoma City.

MR. PETERSON: Ernie Peterson with 3 Rivers Wireless out of Montana.

MR. WICKHAM: Jim Wickham, Arctic Slope Telephone with \-- I\'m located
in Anchorage, but we serve the North Slope of Alaska, inside the Arctic
Circle.

MR. GASAWAY: I\'m Wayne Gasaway with Advantage Cellular in Alexandria,
Tennessee.

MR. McMILLAN: Good morning, I\'m John McMillan with Carolina West
Wireless in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Well, thank you all for joining us today. We
have a wide part of the country represented in rural America. We have to
begin three different stakeholders to hear from in our first panel that
are going to make brief presentations. First Jerry Wilke. Jerry is with
Minnesota Southern Wireless Company, which does business as Hickory Tech
Wireless. He served both as director of market and strategic planning,
and vice president and general manager for the company. He spent the
last three-and-a-half years in strategic planning and corporate
development at Hickory Tech.

Then we\'re going to have Allen Holder. Allen is with the Public Safety
Answering Point in Lincoln City, West Virginia. He\'s the 911 director
there and works closely with \-- on emergency response matters.

Finally Jackie Mines with Quest Wireless 911 product manager. She\'s got
a span of responsibilities that includes developing new products and
services that aid public safety in their delivery of critical emergency
services, serving over 90 public safety agencies which provide emergency
response to over 20 million telephone subscribers. Jackie has worked
closely on integration of wireless phone users into the E911
infrastructure. So with that, we\'ll start with Jerry.

MR. WILKE: Thank you, Jonathan. Good morning all. I appreciate the FCC
giving myself and our company the opportunity to explain and go through
this issue of E911 Phase Two and the stakeholder relationships and what
happened with our company over the last I\'d say four years. Hickory
Tech\'s location geographically, just for your knowledge, is southern
Minnesota from about an hour south of the Twin Cities to the Iowa
border. The southern third of the state of Minnesota is where we operate
as a carrier. We\'ve been in that area for about 12 years, we started in
1992.

Our story on E911 started in the summer of 2000. We are an analog TDMA
carrier, A-banned if anybody wants to now which side in southern
Minnesota. We took a look at both handset technology, and network-based
technology at that point in time, and started gravitating toward a
network-based solution after talking to the equipment vendors and the
handset vendors, and why we started taking that tactic in going to a
network-based solution was mostly to do with the handset side.

We weren\'t seeing handsets being developed that had GPS technology in
them at that time, yet we were seeing developments on the network side
that looked promising, so we started taking that track. We then selected
a positioning equipment, determination equipment vendor, we signed an
agreement with them and then a 911 vendor, TCS is their name. We use a
Nortel switch. It\'s a state of the art Nortel switch. I purchased it in
1996. That fall we ordered our Phase Two 911 software, that was the fall
of 2001. It was delivered in February of 2002. So we were starting to
put together the pieces in early 2002 to deploy a network-based
solution.

We were working with those vendors to put the system in place. We
started out by deploying in our core network 20 sites originally, just
to get it up and running and start testing and integrating it in with
the local PSAPs in our state. What started this activity going, our
state in the fall of 19 \-- no, the spring of 2001, triggered a request,
what we called a bona fide request, the state of Minnesota\'s 911
director sent letters to the carrier saying integrate Phase One and
Phase Two with your state PSAPs and they listed 14 PSAPs in our area. We
covered 12 of those 14.

We initially went back to the state of Minnesota and asked them which
ones were ready to test and had Phase Two capabilities built into their
network. We never got a reply on that so we just went ahead and did it
anyway. We built a network on their faith that all these people were
ready to go. When we first started to do testing last year, late last
year in 2002, we found the first county we tried to test with, their
network was not ready to read the coordinates information, the latitude
and longitude.

We went back to the state again and requested information about which
PSAPs we should do testing with. Again did not get a reply on that
request. Went to the individual PSAPs themselves. Since I\'m a southern
Minnesota person, and I\'ve been in the market for 12 years, I knew my
county sheriffs, I knew the PSAP managers both at the state patrol level
and at the county level, and I knew the gentleman that managed the
network. His name is Jerry Hittle. I knew him very well. We sat down in
his office, we talked this through, we said, we need somebody to test
with this test. We have this internet network, let\'s try it. Let\'s get
it going. That was our first phase of our testing. We started that in
the fall of 2002.

Then came 2003, this year. We asked our PDE vendor for more sites, and
to finish our system upgrade so we had all our sites ready to go. We\'re
currently trying to deploy positioning equipment in everyone of our cell
sites, both the 850 megahertz cell sites and the 1900 megahertz cell
sites, which is presenting some interesting challenges between those two
technologies. Again, we\'re still a TDMA carrier at this point and
we\'re trying to provide network-based 911 solutions.

When we started trying to test with more and more PSAPs we started
finding out two problems we were running into. One was the PSAPs
weren\'t \-- networks weren\'t all ready to receive the Phase Two
latitude and longitude coordinates. Two, we\'re finding out that the
supervisors and the dispatchers weren\'t properly trained to refresh and
read the information, and weren\'t staffing people when we requested
testing. We had asked them for a test, they would say, what day? We
found out Mondays and Fridays were bad days, don\'t talk to us those
days, so we said, fine, give us a date and time, we\'ll test with you,
and we set up the tests, we found out the first time we set up a test
they weren\'t ready, they didn\'t know how to refresh the screen to do
the locations, so we came back the next day and did another test with
them. The dispatcher wasn\'t prepared for the test. After ten calls they
got a little irritated with us and said, come back another day, but we
figured out they were getting the data and he confirmed it, so we just
left them alone after that.

The Mankato, Blue Earth County local PSAP has been probably the best
partner from a testing perspective. That\'s our headquarters town.
They\'ve worked with us all along. He\'s been willing to sit down with
us and go through the problems we\'ve been dealing with. A couple of the
biggest problems we\'ve dealt with along this path we\'ve gone along
until today has been getting the trunks ordered into our switch has been
a big challenge, that\'s one of the big problems, and then dragging some
of the PSAPs along with us, because we have this \-- we\'ve spent \$1
million to date putting this, with no recovery on the cost.

We have this in our network, we want to get it up and running, and
we\'ve been trying to get this up and running and we found out 50
percent of our PSAPs weren\'t ready when we first deployed our first 20
sites. To date, I\'ll give you a success story, we have ten of our 12
PSAPs up and running. The two that aren\'t, their networks won\'t
support the positioning yet. So we have ten of our 12 PSAPs done, we\'re
sending Phase Two information to them today.

The challenges have been that the training from both the consumer side
isn\'t there. I don\'t think the consumers know this even exists in
Minnesota yet. I haven\'t heard what I heard Ken say about Indiana going
on at all in Minnesota. We\'re not hearing anything about Phase Two
technology coming from the state or local, and other challenges we\'ve
been seeing have been the dispatcher training and the time it\'s taking
to go through and set up these tests with these PSAPs.

We want to know that the equipment is working. We want to follow up.
We\'re their neighbors. We live in the market. These people know me,
they know our company, they know my engineering manager, Mark Dundas,
we\'ve been very, very proactive. That was our approach. Be proactive,
not reactive. We spent the \$1 million, let\'s go get it done, and
we\'re almost there, but we have a lot of challenges ahead.

Our company are members of several trade organizations that we\'ve been
meeting and they are RTG, RCA, CTIA and the Minnesota Telephones based
in St. Paul.

This summer myself and a member of RCC Corporation in Alexandria and
another wireless carrier put together a stakeholder forum in St. Paul.
We put it together and it was sponsored by the Minnesota Telephone
Alliance, and we brought the \-- it was similar to this meeting. We
brought the stakeholders together, we wanted to talk through it. What
happened in that meeting was interesting. A lot of the PSAPs told us,
just get it up and running, we don\'t care about the accuracy, just get
it up and running. You rural guys, just work together and get it
working.

But then some of their vendors pointed fingers at us and read lists of
carriers that weren\'t doing any activity, and they gave us a no
activity in June this year and a failing grade, when we had already
deployed \$1 million worth of equipment, and didn\'t have trunks into
our switch because the state didn\'t know how to order them, and had the
equipment available and we were ready to test. We\'ve been ready to test
since fall of 2002, and we haven\'t been getting any cooperation.

So we had significant challenges. Again, our market is a rural market.
It\'s in southern Minnesota. It\'s in an agricultural area that has a
lakes region, so it\'s not a topography that\'s challenging like maybe
Jim\'s arctic slope is and some of the mountainous areas where Ernie is
from, and what we\'ve been trying to do is the right thing from a
regulatory perspective, following what the FCC\'s requirements are, and
trying to work with our vendors to get it done. It\'s been fascinating
to find out this technology what Ken said is true, it\'s very complex,
and they\'re a lot of things we\'re finding out that don\'t work right
now.

We\'ve had issues with our switch vendor and our PDE vendor, the systems
haven\'t talked always well. We\'ve had TCS and PDE vendor issues.
We\'ve had integration issues with the PSAPs networks themselves between
IES and Qwest, and these are all challenges we\'ve had to overcome.

We\'re getting it done, and we\'re seeing some things that are working,
we\'re seeing some things that are not working, but to date, we still
have two more PSAPs to go, and we still need to solve the accuracy
issue. With that I\'ll open it up for any questions that anybody might
have for me. Yes, sir?

MR. FORSTER: I\'m in the Wireless Zero accuracy policy division. What is
the accuracy with the network-based solution?

MR. WILKE: The preliminary results we have are kind of inconclusive
right now, but I would say from our own internal testing, we haven\'t
see it to the standard that the FCC is looking for. It\'s not making it
yet. We\'re about 20 percent off on the accuracy.

MR. FORSTER: Is there any contemplation of going to a handset-based
solution, like changing air interfaces?

MR. WILKE: Yes.

MR. FORSTER: Okay, because I know some carriers are doing that.

MR. WILKE: The challenge for us is when we were taking a look at both
air interfaces, GSM right now I don\'t believe there\'s a handset
available, so that presents a challenge, and CDMA I believe does, but
that\'s another system upgrade. It\'s kind of a perfect storm. We have
to do about a \$10 million upgrade to our network, and deploy a policy,
regulatory issue E911 all at the same time and then try to pick the
right technology without spending the money, which we already spent, \$1
million, so it\'s kind of been an interesting game for us, but we chose
the network-based because at the time we believed that it was the way we
needed to go as a rural carrier.

Now we are providing locates which is making some of the PSAP managers
pretty happy. Any other questions? Yes?

MS. BARTON: Hi. I\'m Jeannie Barton in the Policy Division of Wireless.
You say you\'re 20 percent off in your accuracy. Is that an aggregated
figure? Are you making it in some places and not in others?

MR. WILKE: Yes, we are making it in some places. Our major market cities
do seem to be making it. The trouble is coming up with the testing and
the math based on an overall system configuration. If we just did our
testing in the city of Mankato and Owatonna, Minnesota, we probably
would make it. But we can\'t look at that. We have to look at the whole
system, and that\'s the way we\'re taking the approach on accuracy.
We\'ve got to look at total calls system-wide.

MS. BARTON: But there are \-- there are areas where you have met the
bench marks for accuracy and what portion do you know of your coverage
area is that?

MR. WILKE: I would say right now we probably have 50 percent of it.

MS. BARTON: Thanks very much.

MR. SEITS: I\'m Steve Seits of the National Networking Members
Association. I just want to \-- I\'ve made several offers to you folks
in Washington. I guess you said you have a lot of challenges in states.
It kind of went off of this, but I actually talked a little about ? I
know you get a lot of people. I want to just reopen that offer. Anything
you guys need help with, to all rural carriers, please feel free to
contact us as you\'re addressing some of these challenges with consumer
education or PSAP. I just want to make sure you hear that offer from me
as well, because I told that to your Washington representation on
several occasions.

MR. WILKE: Thank you. Yes?

MR. DICKENSON: I\'m Dickenson with TCS. I\'m familiar with Hickory Tech.
I\'m sure that the reason you were invited to speak today is because
you\'re the poster boy for rural carriers because you\'ve been so
aggressive in your deployment efforts. But the point I would like to
make, for the FCC and for someone at the FCC to take away today related
to your discussion, is that a couple of years ago, I had lunch with
Blaze Cinto and I can\'t remember who the other one with the FCC was,
but she was Lauren\'s predecessor, I think, and at that time the FCC was
contemplating the Richardson decision which stipulates, which they
subsequently agreed that PSAPs could request Phase Two service even if
they were not yet ready to receive it, assuming that they would be ready
in six months. At that time I warned the FCC that if you agree to this,
you\'re going to be creating situations just like what you\'ve described
where the wireless carrier has been prepared, spent all that money,
you\'ve come into the PSAP and the PSAP is suddenly not ready.

Unlike Phase One, Phase Two can be a very rapid deployment because
you\'ve got a lot of the infrastructure already in place with Phase One,
so when Phase Two comes along, the wireless carrier can be knocking at
the PSAP\'s door rather quickly, especially in light of some of the
FCC\'s recent fees that have been imposed upon the wireless carriers for
their lack of aggressiveness in Phase One, they\'ve got the message now
and Phase Two is a much more rapid deployment. So I would use this
opportunity to point out to the FCC that you may want to consider or
reconsider the Richardson decision and make it mandatory that the PSAPs
be actually ready to receive Phase Two service at the time that they
make their Phase Two request.

MR. HAYNES: Anthony Haynes with the Tennessee Emergency Communications
Board. You mentioned a trunking issue and that you lost a lot of time
because of the state did not know how to order trunking and I was just
talking to Richard, and we \-- I know in our states it\'s the carrier\'s
responsibility to order the trunking interconnect, and I was just
wondering if that was something unique to your area, or maybe in some of
the other rural areas that in the states that they\'re in this is
something we just wasn\'t aware of.

MR. WILKE: I believe it\'s unique to the Minnesota situation. They
attempted to try to put together an order I think, but they didn\'t
apparently know where to put the order into is what I\'ve been told. We
didn\'t wait for that. We waited four months. That was enough. We wanted
to get going, so we put in the order on our own dime and we ordered the
trunks and we\'re still getting the bill for all our trunks today for
911, even though the state in our 911 contract agreed to pay for them,
the bill for TCS is still coming to Hickory Tech, we\'re getting it
every month, and we\'ve ordered those trunks on our own nickel and dime
to do that. We didn\'t want to wait any longer to see if the state was
going to come through, but maybe in Tennessee it\'s different. I think
it\'s \-- across the U.S. it\'s different in every state, these issues.
It just depends on the state and what the state directors and 911
departments at the state level are doing, but in our state they\'re
supposed to order them.

MR. PETERSON: Gary, in Montana, we have a situation where we order the
trunks through the selective router, they ordered the trunks the other
side of the selectee router, so it\'s a mixed situation. Had a very
similar situation with a county who was not in a situation where they
could order the trunks to the selective router, so we had our trunks
ready to go and they couldn\'t get theirs ordered or get them provisions
correctly. Same situation.

MR. WILKE: In Minnesota the state had ordered the trunks from the
selective router in Kasson, Minnesota to Mankato but Mankato Citizens
Telephone, which is a division of Hickory Tech to Hickory Tech Wireless,
which is two miles away, they couldn\'t figure out how to order the
trunks from that switch to our switch two miles away, and that\'s where
the holdup got stuck.

MR. GASAWAY: While we\'re talking about that issue, I\'m Wayne Gasaway
from Alexandria, Tennessee, and to follow up what Anthony said, in
Tennessee we\'ve had great cooperation with the state and with the local
PSAPs, and therefore we have deployed a network-based system too that is
working, and we feel within the accuracy of it, but it\'s taken a lot of
cooperation from all parties involved, especially on the funding of it,
so it\'s worked very well in Tennessee.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thank you, Jerry. That was a great discussion
and it\'s a perfect time for the PSAP perspective from Allen Holder from
the Lincoln City, West Virginia PSAP.

MR. HOLDER: Good morning. I want to tell you a little bit about Lincoln
County, because I guess I have to prove that we are as rural as we truly
are. We are a consolidated dispatch center covering the entire county of
Lincoln. We dispatch for one county ambulance service with three
stations scattered across our 450 square mile county, eight volunteer
fire departments, a small sheriff\'s department, and a state police
detachment located within our county. The county is 450 square miles
with a resident population of about 21,000. We\'re located next to
Kanawha County and Cabell County where the two largest cities in the
state of West Virginia are located, but when you look at that in
comparison with other cities across the country, our capital city is
probably considered rural in some ways.

Most of the people that live in our county do travel outside the county
somewhere else to work. Our largest employer is the school board, so we
don\'t have a lot of industry in the county, and we are truly a bedroom
community. Last year when the only traffic light in the county
malfunctioned and was down for several months, the \-- and that\'s why
I\'m going this direction, the city\'s only police officer determined
that it wasn\'t really necessary, and the light was taken down and
replaced with stop signs, so we are rural, and I would go as far as to
say that we\'re not the only one in West Virginia that is just as rural,
and when you start to travel through some of the midwestern states like
I have done so, it makes me feel like I am in a city sometimes, because
there are other locations like that just across the country.

Now I guess the good news is that I can say that we are completely done.
We are Phase Two with all of our carriers. I can say that with a smile
on my face. But I don\'t have to tell you that we only have two
carriers, and we only have three tower sites. So I have a perspective on
when it works, how it works, and in our case, we have a one tier one
company providing cellular service using a network solution over a TDMA
system. Today, as we speak, they are turning their GSM site of that
network on. I also have a tier two company, that is providing a handset
solution using CDMA, so I have a comparison of how the two systems work
in a rural area.

One thing that I might add, I\'ve heard some discussion and a lot of
people making the comments that accuracy in Phase Two might not be as
critical or as important in a rural location as it is in a city. Well, I
beg to differ. In my county, we probably have more ATV accidents than we
do auto fatalities every year. We probably have more people lost in the
woods than get lost in Washington, D.C. We don\'t have traffic problems
and sometimes we literally do roll up the streets at midnight.

Up until just a few years ago, our county PSAP was the only operation
that was open 24 hours a day. So if you\'re involved in a motor vehicle
crash on a rural road, or you\'re in the woods and you\'ve become
injured while hunting or taking part of many of the other activities
that go on in a rural area, and you call 911 from your cell phone, if
you have accuracy information, we can probably find you. But if you
don\'t have Phase Two, you may be there for a couple of years, and when
I say that, everybody laughs, but we\'ve all seen situations in my
county and other counties through southern West Virginia, where people
have called for help or family members have called for help because
someone was lost in the woods and disoriented, or because there was an
ATV accident, and searches that have went on for two and three and four
days for these people.

So it is very important that when we do have cell service, and people do
open up their handheld and they see that they\'ve got cell service, that
they also have the ability to be located because they have that false
sense of security. I\'ve got my cell phone, they can find me. That\'s
not always the case, and without wireless technology that provides
location information, it\'s just as critical for us in Lincoln County,
West Virginia where we are as rural as it gets, for someone to have
location information in Washington, D.C.

Chances are that if you get hurt in a larger city, sooner or later
somebody will come by and find you. Sooner or later you\'ll see a street
sign that tells you where you\'re at. That\'s not always the situation
in a rural community.

Now as far as accuracy concerns are, we have been testing and looking in
the field for the last few weeks, there are some significant differences
between a handset solution, and a network-based solution. To be quite
honest it\'s the difference between night and day. One of my biggest
concerns is that when you\'re looking at accuracy on a network-based
solution, is that you\'re able to average over the entire market.

Well, in Charleston, West Virginia, which is part of the same market
that I\'m in, they\'re going to be accurate, and it\'s going to work,
and they\'re going to fall within those FCC guidelines. But when you
average it in with me, they\'re probably still going to fall within
those guidelines, but when you look at my county by itself, chances are
we may have a ten percent accuracy rate with a network-based solution,
and understanding that TDMA just hasn\'t been developed to provide a
handset based solution, I\'m just crossing my fingers for the day that
those handsets are developed, or we see ourselves in a GSM situation
where TDMA is no longer actually being out there. But as we know, AM
radio hasn\'t left us, and there are people out there that still use
Beta recorders, and the technology will be there for a long time.

So it may be a long time before we see the accuracy with a network-based
solution that we want to in a rural area, but as far as the handset
based solution, we\'re averaging somewhere between one to two foot on
every call that\'s placed, but then again, how accurate is GPS in a
rural area? It\'s pretty good unless you\'re up against a mountain.
There are some locations that you just can\'t get a GPS signal in a
rural location, but for the most part we\'ve seen some tremendous
advantages to the system and both systems have been operational now
since August of this year, and we\'ve had a lot of people that have come
in and looked at it.

We deployed a CAD system back in September, and you mentioned I think at
one time the amount of handsets that are out there that are Phase Two
ready, well, we were surprised to find out how many handsets truly are
Phase Two ready that people don\'t realize that. They\'re already
carrying handsets that are Phase Two capable, and we had people that
came in from Tennessee, people that came in from Pennsylvania, people
that came in from several areas across the country that were in areas
where Phase Two is not available, but when they came into our county to
test our CAD system, and dialed 911, their phones worked and they were
Phase Two capable. So we\'ve seen some good results and we\'re very
pleased with what we\'ve seen so far, and I\'ll open it up for questions
I guess.

MR. CADE: And as you can see by Allen\'s enthusiasm, it is possible to
make it happen in rural America if you work hard enough, and, of course,
there\'s special variables involved in there as well. Jimmy Jeannette
from West Virginia is here also, who is a neighboring county of Allen\'s
and has a slightly different story that may be helpful to demonstrate
the critical need that we\'ve all been talking about, cooperation and
communication and collaboration to make this happen, and communication,
I believe, is obviously an issue, because I\'ve got the Hickory Tech
story from the other side. So I know there are communication issues
attached to all of these discussions, and perhaps Jimmy would like to
report his efforts to work in concert with the carriers.

MR. JEANNETTE: My name is Jimmy Jeannette. I\'m the director of 911 in
McDowell County, West Virginia. In March of last year we requested Phase
Two service from one of our major tier one carriers, and were planning
on deploying Phase Two October 1st of this year. We had made all the
necessary arrangements at our PSAP, we had previously deployed Phase Two
with another tier two carrier, and were ready to accommodate our Phase
Two request. Up until almost the exact day of deployment, we were still
planning on deploying Phase Two. The biggest problem that we have, like
Allen\'s county, is we\'re a very rural county also.

Our county only has one tower site from this particular carrier, and
therefore they could not give us a Phase Two solution. They have since
sold the licenses for those areas, and that transfer took place almost
the exact day that our Phase Two request was supposed to have been
implemented. So there was very little communication between the PSAP up
until we found out in hearings at the state legislature that they had
planned to sell these sites.

So I think a major issue that has to be resolved is the communication
between the PSAPs and the carriers if we\'re going to move forward with
Phase Two.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Well, we\'ve heard a lot about luck issues, so
with that I\'ll turn it over to Jackie Mines with Qwest.

MS. MINES: Thank you, Commissioner. I represent a LEC, which is not a
very popular thing to be these days, and I\'m glad that there\'s not a
lot of food and drink in the room, and that it\'s a very nice room so no
one will throw that food and drink at me. All kidding aside, Qwest is
the predominant 911 telecommunications provider in the 14-state region
of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming,
Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and
Oregon. We serve a total of 727 enhanced 911 PSAPs today, which
represents approximately 99 percent of the population, and 96 percent of
the geography.

Qwest is very proud and would like to recognize that many of our regions
PSAP managers and statewide 911 program managers have been the first to
trial E911, deploy it on a statewide or region-wide effort, and to
deploy wireless technology. Many of the best practices that you heard
about yesterday of wireless deployment are due to the efforts of people
like Ken Keim of Oregon, Nancy Pollock and Jim Beadles-Barker of
Minnesota, Marlis Davis and Bob Oenning of Washington, and Anita Velasco
and Barbara Yeager in Arizona, and John Benson in Iowa. Because they
were willing to think outside the box, shift their paradigms of how E911
was deployed, and trial different and new technology and learn the hard
way, we are all able to benefit from their experience.

But in the Qwest region, we have also those PSAPs that are very, very
rural, and there are very unique challenges to that. Historically our
PSAPs have not necessarily, or these PSAPs, have not necessarily been
the early adaptors of E911, and they aren\'t for wireless 911. They want
to make sure that that technology proves itself, they were waiting for
Phase Two technology, and they did not have those resources that are
required to learn the hard way. Quite simply, we know it breaks down to
funding and the cost of deploying in those states.

Our states are characterized by small population and large geographic
areas. Because of this, early on Qwest encouraged statewide deployments
wherever possible. To do a statewide deployment enabled Qwest to address
network needs as a state, to look at where you absolutely had to do some
upgrading, and effectively utilize existing infrastructure. We found
that those deployments are labor intensive and intimidating, and Qwest
customers were used to looking to Qwest to manage 911 projects.

In many states Qwest has operated as a project lead, interfacing between
the state program manager and the wireless carriers and third-party
vendors. We\'ve worked to set priorities, manage the schedule around
PSAP upgrades, and helped develop training materials for PSAPs and
coordinate testing. We have done this in varying capacities from full
project deployment to partial project deployment in states like Iowa and
Nebraska, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, and North Dakota.

These states don\'t collect a large surcharge as you can imagine, but
the cost can be higher. We have many wireless carriers who are deploying
in those particular states, with a very limited small footprint.
Sometimes that\'s the only state that they do business in.

Qwest early on developed a solution in 1997 for Phase One that was
trialed out in King County, Washington and in Minnesota for developing
that solution allowed the carrier to send 20 digits into the selective
router, but did not require PSAPs to have to upgrade on their end. Many
small carriers adopted that technology. It did not require huge
infrastructure upgrades on their end, and it did not require upgrades at
the PSAP. However, when the end CAD solution was developed, Qwest was
one of the first adopters, and our wireless business unit adopted that
technology.

In anticipation of Phase Two, all of our tandem switches or selective
routers were upgraded to the J-standard requirements by the fall of
2002. Our 911 alley notes were upgraded in January of 2002 to the E2
poll interface and tested with third-party vendors throughout the first
and second quarters of that year.

Qwest has tried to be flexible in offering changes within the network to
accommodate wireless carriers, both for Phase One and Phase Two
technology choices, and where we can for PSAP customer requirements.
When carriers have requested that we change our ordering process to be
easier for them, we accommodated. When they\'ve asked us to escalate
orders so they can meet their FCC deadlines, we\'ve also tried to
accommodate.

Recognizing that the cost can stop deployment efforts, Qwest has
partnered with various state PSAP managers, program managers, and PUC
commissions to develop pricing methodologies that allowed states to
offer either full or cost recovery or partial cost recovery to wireless
carriers as well as to have statewide ubiquitous deployments.
Recognizing this, the state of North Dakota worked with us for about six
months and through six pricing reiterations to come up with the right
balance so they could deploy a statewide 911 solution, and in the state
of Colorado, Qwest pays the wireless carrier bills and spreads that cost
over every subscriber.

Although it\'s been frustrating at times, it does feel good in the end
after everybody has come to the table, cooperated, discussed, and
ultimately come to a solution that we could all live with. Some have
questioned Qwest\'s commitment to 911 through all the downsizing
efforts, yet our company has recognized the importance of 911 and our
911 operations center and the network support groups have never been
downsized. Product management has, but we\'re not the people that make
the system work from day to day. We\'ve had to be leaner, smarter, work
harder, and spend more wisely, keeping our eye on the future and hoping
that every investment we make can be utilized further down the road.

Any questions? Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Do you have any questions or comments for the
panel as a whole, or any further issues you want to address? If not,
I\'d like to thank the panel for an excellent presentation. We\'ll move
on to the next panel of speakers. We have I think two more speakers
coming, Kyle Gruis and George Marble, if they can come on up.

Well, as we\'ve heard, E911 deployment in rural areas can present real
accuracy problems. During our next panel we want to hear from the
experts on the latest issues involving both handset and network
solutions. For example, how can we achieve timely delivery of handsets
to CMA carriers or TDMA carriers, what is the latest on the development
of GSM handsets? On the network solutions side, we want to hear about
the accuracy numbers, and whether or not there are new technologies that
can boost accuracy. Finally, we\'d like to discuss the feasibility of
improved network accuracy through tower sharing and other collaborative
group efforts like that. As many of you know, these issues are all so
critical in our nations rural areas, and especially important for our
citizens that live there. Before I introduce our next speaker, I\'d like
to ask the new members of the roundtable to introduce themselves if you
haven\'t introduced yourself already, just tell us where you\'re from
and who you\'re with.

MR. POMERANTZ: My name is Scott Pomerantz, and I\'m with Global Locate,
and we provide assisted GPS technology and we focused primarily on the
GSM of the non-synchronous networks for those solutions on a ten basis.

MR. JONES: I\'m David Jones from Spartanburg County, South Carolina.
I\'m with the National Emergency Network Association.

MR. PREST: Art Prest. I\'m with Alpine PCS and RFB Cellular and I\'m
here representing the rural cellular association.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Well, thank you. We\'re going to start with Kyle
Gruis, then we\'ll move on to George Marble. Kyle Gruis worked at the
Rural Cellular Corporation since 1996 acting \-- you don\'t look old
enough for that, acting in various roles in network operations,
engineering and product development. Kyle\'s current role at RCC is
managing network operations and engineering, in two of RCC\'s four
operating regions, as well as technical R&D and product development
support for new applications and services and supporting technical
mandate research and deployment.

Prior to joining RCC, Kyle was employed for five years at US West, a new
vector group in Minneapolis. Kyle?

MR. GRUIS: Well, thank you, Commissioner. Good morning. I\'m going to
talk for a few minutes this morning about a couple of deployments that
RCC has undertaken in Phase Two, and the results of them, and some ideas
that we\'d like to share with everybody on how we can further the cause
of bringing 911 to the rural markets.

Just a little bit about RCC first. We operate in 14 states, and true to
our name it is very rural markets that we serve. We have 34 RSAs, and
three small MSAs, Bangor, Maine, Burlington, Vermont, and Portsmouth,
New Hampshire. We manage about 5.9 million pops, and have around 750,000
customers currently. Our networks are predominantly TDMA and analog
networks. We do have a small spattering of GSM and CDMA networks, but
the vast majority are TDMA and analog today, and we\'re just starting to
deploy CDMA and GSM as a 2.5g overlay as most carriers are in the
country today.

What we\'re seeing is that we believe the FCC\'s Phase Two deadlines
might be inadvertently jeopardizing rural American\'s access to reliable
wireless phone service and the emergency response services. Part of the
reason for that is these deadlines are forcing small carriers to invest
their limited cap ex in E911 Phase Two technology that we feel like is
really incapable of providing us the accurate location information that
we need for wireless carriers, or customers, excuse me.

In particular, the rural carriers that are operating TDMA networks are
somewhat singled out in this stance because there is no handset based
solution available for TDMA and analog carriers. If we had chosen the
CDMA path and CDMA roaming partners several years ago, this would have
been a much different situation for RCC in particular. We feel like the
investment in the network-based Phase Two equipment is prohibitively
expensive, and in rural markets it\'s just now showing the accuracy that
we need. We don\'t question the ability for the network-based equipment
to operate well in more built-up areas where the cell density is higher,
but in the middle of nowhere it\'s just tough to get those
triangulations happening. We found that the use of the angle of arrival
technology that\'s been suggested by our vendor is not really workable
in most cases, they\'re large antennas that the towers have a hard time
supporting. In many states we operate in the permitting time frames are
very long and difficult, and we just found that the AOA is not a very
workable solution for us.

So what we found is that while our wireless networks are pretty good for
voice networks, they\'re not so good for a location network overall. A
couple of examples where we\'re live today, we have a network-based
solution using TDOA technology from Grayson Andrew Wireless. We use
Intrado for our MPC services, and we\'ve been able to garner some real
world test results from the state boards and from our partner, Intrado.

In Vermont we\'ve deployed 51 cell sites to meet our 50 percent
population coverage for the first milestone, and in Minnesota we\'ve
deployed over 100 TDOA sites, and in Alabama we\'re in the process of
deploying in two counties, much like one of the earlier examples, these
are very sparsely populated counties where we have one cell site in each
county, so that presents its own challenges.

In Vermont we\'ve invested approximately \$2 million to get to the first
50 percent population milestone in hopes of achieving the accuracy
standards.

We\'ve gotten an accuracy report from Evelyn Bailey\'s office and it\'s
Intrado reports that we receive regularly. It shows what those 51 cell
sites in the most densely populated parts of Vermont. We\'ve only been
able to achieve 26 percent of the calls within the 100 meters, and
that\'s 26 percent, not 66 percent, and an additional 20 percent within
300 meters, for a total of less than half of the calls being able to be
located within 300 meters. Vermont is an example where we have a fairly
good-sized city in Burlington that we actually have been counting, you
know, averaging everything together but even Burlington, Vermont can\'t
overcome the rest of the market to achieve a suitable accuracy standard
for us.

Many of the calls, 40 percent of them actually, are locating at
accuracies, or uncertainties, of 500 meters or more, which we\'ve found
calls into question the whole basis of locating it in the first place,
and approximately 30 percent of the calls even show up at the PSAP as a
Phase Two location information call due to several reasons, one of them
being just no fix, no triangulation.

Minnesota, we operate in the northern half of Minnesota where Hickory
Tech is in the southern half. We\'ve invested around \$4 million in a
100-cell site TDOA network to get to again, to try to accomplish that 50
percent population coverage. Northern Minnesota is fairly sparsely
covered and there are no real major tones that we operate in. We\'ve had
slightly better luck in Minnesota and we feel like because it\'s just
more forgivable terrain not as many big mountains and more contiguous
coverage, and with that said, we were able to get 23 percent of the
calls with 100 meters, and an additional 35 percent within 300 meters,
so it\'s slightly better, although not even close to the accuracy
standard. Many of the calls, again, locate between 500 and 1400 meters
on certainty.

We do have a lot better luck getting the location fix in Minnesota, 83
percent of the Phase Two capable calls do show up with location
information of some type, and we feel like that\'s because it\'s just
more even terrain.

In Alabama we had two counties request service in Northern Alabama.
RCC\'s footprint in our south region is almost a ribbon of RSA\'s
stretching from southeastern Alabama to northwestern Mississippi. The
two counties that happened to request service were Fayette and Lamar
County which are in the very northwest corner of Alabama, and they\'re
almost like a highway of counties going through there, so RCC only
operates one cell site in each of these counties. We\'re surrounded by
Verizon and Alltel are the A-side carriers neighboring to us, so we feel
like that\'s not a good option to even try to integrate with them. Since
they\'re handset-based that really doesn\'t work for us.

What we did is, we deployed two location sites, one in each county, and
an additional three at the three closest cell sites to where those two
counties were within RCC\'s footprint, and recently have turned that up
and found that that\'s not going to make it. That\'s not \-- there\'s no
way to achieve the fixes that the PSAPs are asking for. So that was a
total of about a \$200,000 test that we\'ve fallen short on.

What we\'re doing to work through this is to work with the PSAPs and
share these tests results with them and try to work out a plan to get to
our compliance whereas we\'re looking at other options. We\'re looking
at, you know, adding more sites. We\'re trying to speed up our overlays.

So what we would like to tell everyone RCC has been successful because
we understand and respond to the needs of rural customers. We\'ve done
this \-- it\'s our only business is serving rural customers, and we
believe that they deserve and expect to place 911 calls and receive
these emergency services. So what we\'re recommending is that the AGPS
technology which is better suited for the relatively open spaces and the
rural carriers footprints is the way to go for us, and we\'d like to
recommend that we have some time to develop these next generation
networks rather than spending unlimited cap ex on a network-based
solution that we really feel like is going to be short term as we\'re
going to change out our networks anyway and move away from TDMA as
quickly as our capital plan will allow. Let us spend that money on the
overlays rather than the location networks.

We also ask that rather than the 95 percent penetration criteria for
handsets, we move more towards a criteria where all of the new handsets
at some point in time are location capable rather than this 95 percent
penetration. We just have a lot of customers and I\'m sure many of you
in front of me would agree, that they like their analog phone that\'s
mounted in their truck or they carry it on their bag phone and I can\'t
get it out of their hands. So what am I supposed to do? They don\'t want
my new fancy CDMA handset. They like what they have just fine. So we can
gradually over a long time weed those out, but it\'s not something that
we can just run out there and do and keep our customers happy. That\'s
all I have. Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Any questions? Evelyn?

MS. BAILEY: I\'m Evelyn Bailey from the state of Vermont. I don\'t have
so much a question as just an affirmation of much of what you said. This
is a carrier who has worked really hard with the State of Vermont to
meet the FCC\'s requirements. We\'ve had an excellent working
relationship with all six of the carriers that we have, and I really
appreciate your honest in just laying out what you have found. They\'ve
done everything right, and the accuracy just isn\'t there. From the
PSAPs perspective, averaging out over an entire market, that\'s really
great, that gives the FCC something to work with. What I\'m looking at
is that 911 call that came from that person right then, that location
information had better be real good or it just \-- it\'s just a tragedy
waiting to happen.

So I hope that what I\'d like to amplify is just to say how complicated
it is in a rural area, especially a very mountainous, very rugged, very
sparsely populated rural area, for carriers to always meet the accuracy
requirements. Even a global positioning solution in a rugged terrain
with lots of trees is not always going to work well either, and we
understand those limitations.

We hope that you folks understand it as well, and what we need to do is
to keep working toward the point where every single 911 call that comes
in to a PSAP at a particular point in time has the accuracy necessary to
get help to that person, not averaged over a market, not averaged over
multiple regions or states. That doesn\'t help the PSAP at all.

We really appreciate what RCC has done, and appreciate again, I\'d like
to say, your honesty here, because we need to hear that, the FCC needs
to hear that, and it\'s very refreshing.

MR. GRUIS: Well, thank you, and Vermont has been a great partner to work
with so far.

MR. KOON: Thank you. I\'m Dave Koon from New York. One of the things
that you just mentioned is the analog phone and trying to get them out
of people\'s hands. Do you have the names of all those people and the
type of phones they have so that you can mail to them, and say, you\'re
not \-- you can\'t be found in a state of emergency and how, you know,
this is what we can do to help you, or how do we get out to those people
who have those analog phones and still using them, and don\'t have the
GPS chip or don\'t have any way of being located. That\'s going to be a
real challenge, I think, for all of us and I think we all need to work
toward that, but how can you help us with that?

MR. GRUIS: Well, I guess I\'m not much of a marketer, but I believe that
we do know who those customers are. We talk to our customers quite a
bit, being a small carrier, and we\'re local, in these little small
towns. I\'m not so sure that they are as interested in some of the new
fancy technologies as they are in having their phone work just the way
they feel like it should, and we do spend quite a bit of time trying to
educate our customers that really this digital stuff is getting a lot
better now, and their perception is their perception, and they just
prefer to have what they have right now, so I don\'t have a good
marketing story for that. I\'m sorry.

MR. KOON: Even the 911 \-- even the location of the cell site \--

MR. GRUIS: No, I would say no. They\'re very independent people up there
in northern Minnesota, northern Vermont, and northern everywhere else
where we operate. They\'ve got it all figured out.

MR. GASAWAY: I\'m Wayne Gasaway. The accuracy in locating your
customers, is that a factor of the terrain or the technology or a
combination of both?

MR. GRUIS: I think it\'s got something to do with the terrain. The way
our networks were designed, we chose to implement TDOA at existing TDMA
cell site locations just because of all the things I talked about with
extra time frames and everything to add location only sites, and you
know, in northern Minnesota we get away with having cell sites 40 miles
apart from each other. They\'re real tall, and they\'re 500 feet tall,
and they\'re 40 miles apart from each other, and you can\'t see three
cell sites at one time from your phone. You don\'t need to to place a
wireless call, you need to to place a location call, so I think it\'s a
combination. In Vermont there\'s just places that you don\'t have any
coverage because it\'s not practical or possible to cover the tops of
mountains or what not, but it\'s a combination of both, I think, and
largely just because of the network design.

MR. GASAWAY: If there were more cell sites, do you think it would work
satisfactorily?

MR. GRUIS: Yes, and in fact, we see that where in Burlington we\'ve got
10 or 12 cell sites, it works pretty good there. You get 50 miles away
from Burlington, not so good anymore.

MS. HANSEN: Hi. Jenny Hansen from Montana, and I think from a PSAP
perspective, and Assemblyman Koon\'s issue on outreach and educating the
ranchers with the bag phone, we\'ve got to identify the uniqueness in
rural America and yeah, I\'m from Montana, you can say everything you
want about people, some people that don\'t want to be found, and they
want to hang on to those bag phones and they want their roads paved, but
they want that last best place privacy and they just want convenience of
being able to make a phone call and the issue of 911 and finding me
doesn\'t ever come up, and frankly, they don\'t want that.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Art?

MR. PREST: Kyle, how long does it usually take you to build a cell site
in Vermont from start to finish or from permit to construction?

MR. GRUIS: In Vermont, we have some unique challenges. It can take
anywhere from probably one to three years and sometimes more. It really
varies by state. There are some that are much more stringent on their
requirements than others. So, three years is not uncommon though.

MR. POMERANTZ: Scott Pomerantz from Global Locate. I can tell you what
it\'s taking in regard to availability of handsets in the GSM world is
absolutely true. It\'s quite a bit more difficult to solve the GPS
location problem in a GSM environment than in a CDMA environment, AND
we\'ve been working as I mentioned, heads down on that for the better
part of four years with veterans from the GPS business. That problem has
been solved. The network is in. We have a worldwide reference network
that\'s deployed with 100 percent POP coverage. If you have a cell phone
on the planet, we can get data to you. But your point is well taken.
 There is no GSM phones yet with the GPS chips in \--

MR. GRUIS: We have two microphones going there.

MR. POMERANTZ: \-- and I know that first-hand and they will be here in
volume by the end of 2004 and phasing in in the middle of 2004, so you
can rest assured they have been tested, beaten, prodded, and they are
working very well. So if they are not here yet, they will be, and they
work fine. The network is tried and true. Our network is in Nextel. We
provide for Nextel E911 data services, that\'s feeding the satellite
data over their network through our network and our partner, with Nortel
on that particular implementation. We signed up for a five-nines,
that\'s five minutes of outage a year, as you well know. We beat that
the last year. The data is there, and the only thing we\'re waiting for
now are the handsets, and we\'re working hard on that as well with our
chip sets, so a little patience.

MR. GRUIS: Great, well, we\'re pushing hard on the GSM as hard as the
little guy can with the handset guys, but anybody else that would like
to help us push, that would be great.

MR. NEIHARDT: Thanks. Is this on? Jonas Neihardt with Qualcomm, and just
to embellish Scott\'s point on the handset availability, and to look
back at the CDMA handset experience, first of all, on GSM, we do
understand that vote-on-phone is going to have a GSM phone out in the
next six months with assisted GPS on board in volume, and that is just
another data point to backstop Scott\'s point on assisted GPS over GSM,
and let\'s look back on the CDMA experience. I mean, right now,
virtually all the new activations coming on through the CDMA pipeline
include assisted GPS and we have the parts cost down on that platform
down to 70 cents per handset, and I know that it was substantially more
expensive at the beginning of that process.

Moore\'s law is aiding us. We\'re burning the measurement capability
into the chip site, and we don\'t a la carte price that from Qualcomm.
That\'s just part of the package, and it\'s \-- again, it\'s becoming a
nominal expense and inevitably, that\'s what\'s going to happen for the
GSM side too. This country is just too vast to have triangulation in all
places. It\'s just a big \-- too big a country, and you\'re right on the
antenna siting issue, it\'s too hard to put sites up everywhere that you
would need them, and that\'s the bad news. But the good news is that
again, Moore\'s Law is inevitably enabling us to burn the measurement
capability into different types of handsets, and those are on the way.

MR. GRUIS: Sounds like great news.

MR. PETERSON: Ernie Peterson with 3 Rivers in Montana again. I want to
echo that. We\'ve found the CDMA handset pricing to be acceptable. It
really is coming down to those levels. But to echo your point, the
challenge we now face is reaching those final penetration rates, because
again, we still have customers who are bringing in their own phones, or
bringing in grey market phones, or whatever, so while that price has
come down to where it\'s an acceptable level to sell those and put those
into our markets, I still think we\'re going to face some penetrations
at the very end that are going to be very tough to make, because people
just are not going to go there, and I recognize the fact that you can
tell them over and over again that this phone is safer, and brings them
more location technology but, I guarantee you, when it comes down to a
price or a phone they already have, a lot of them just don\'t care.

MR. GRUIS: Oh, I agree, and the second point is to, you know, allow us
to get these networks in place and start moving those handsets out into
the customer base rather than spending money on an interim solution.

MR. WICKHAM: I\'d like to add a little bit to \-- in describing an area
that we serve, which is rural, it\'s 92,000 square miles, a geographic
area bigger than the state of Minnesota, we have nine home rule villages
and we serve the oil industrial complex which accounts for about 20
percent of the U.S. oil, and we also serve the beginning of the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline. We serve a harsh environment. Safety is a way of
life, and analog telephones do the job in the tundra, in the Arctic
Circle. They have great coverage. We\'re the same way. In answer to
Art\'s question, from the time we start to build the cell site, it takes
us about three years. There are no roads in the Arctic Circle. You
either fly or you don\'t get there. It has to freeze up before we can
haul towers and cell site equipment, so you know, the analog phone and
TDMA, they\'re doing the job, they\'re doing what these people want, yet
we can\'t meet the FCC\'s requirements. So, from a real rural small
company, you know, the answer has got to be around a long time and so
does TDMA.

MR. GRUIS: I agree.

MS. BENNETT: I\'m Cary Bennett. I\'d just like to put in here as a
solution, because we\'re supposed to be looking for solutions, is that
the handset vendors, if they can all put a GPS in and I grant you that
some people don\'t want to be found. Maybe they can just turn their
phones off when they don\'t want to be found. But if we went forward
thinking, you know, aggressively here, and had all handsets made with
GPS technology going forward, wouldn\'t we eventually be where everybody
wanted to be, and we would be doing that at an affordable cost, because
I heard you say it doesn\'t cost very much to put this in the handsets,
and we could move on and get to where we need to be, and I think that\'s
one angle we need to look at, is the handset vendors making all future
phones GPS capable.

MR. POMERANTZ: It\'s not going to happen tomorrow, but it is happening,
and it\'s a good start. It\'s a pretty good manufacturer.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Excuse me. Could you repeat the question? Some
people couldn\'t hear you in the back.

MR. POMERANTZ: Oh, I\'m sorry. I was just commenting on the fact that
the technology GPS is going in the handsets. Nokia announced publicly
that they are planning in their roadmap to put assisted GPS technology
in every one of the handsets that come out of their factory.

MS. BENNETT: Even TDMA?

MR. POMERANTZ: If they can \-- I think they\'re really talking about
CDMA. I think they\'re talking about GSM. Third-generation, so \--

MS. BENNETT: I think that\'s the problem we have with these legacy rural
networks. You can hear they\'re not going away anytime soon, and we need
handset vendors to make handsets that have GPS in them for TDMA, and if
they can do it for analog,

I don\'t know if it\'s technically possible, but that\'s where we need
to, I think, focus some of this because we as rural carriers do not have
enough volume to drive the handset vendors to do this, but maybe we
could get some help from the FCC and Congress to do it. Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you share with us what the expectation
level is for rural PSAP where the accuracy is falling short? Have they
shared with you their view on this?

MR. GRUIS: I\'d say in general they\'ve been very cooperative with us.
We\'re telling them basically the same stories I\'m sharing today and
saying look, here\'s what we\'ve done, here\'s what we can get for you.
What do you want to do now? Really these networks haven\'t been online
for a period of time that we really arrived at conclusions everywhere.
But I think an important point for carriers is to make dang sure that
when you put these networks in, talk to your PSAP communities and make
sure that they understand where you\'re coming from, what your
challenges are, and you know, lay some options out for timing and it\'s
really up to them to establish a really hard and fast timeline for us in
many cases, and it\'s, you know, their patience and their
cooperativeness with us helps us get both of us to where we want to be,
so in general, I think it\'s been very receptive and they understand
where we\'re coming from. Tim, did you have a question?

MR. DUFFY: Commenting about the \-- this is Tim Duffy from Dobson
Communications, about the \-- trying to get folks like Nokia to put
assisted GPS in TDMA, well, the good news is that the TDMA handset
manufacturers will no longer be manufacturing a whole lot of TDMA going
forward, but it\'s the legacy issue, and as a rural carrier, I\'m
concerned about the amount of money that carriers like Rural Cellular
and Dobson Communications are investing in a technology that does not
meet the requirements set out by the FCC as well as the expectation on
the PSAP level. It\'s a lot of money, and we\'re \-- Kyle, you referred
to the dead spots that occur in vast areas of your network, and, of
course, I\'ve got those as well. Maybe we don\'t know exactly where they
are, but at least they could make a call if we\'re spending money on
building new coverage, rather than putting in technology that at best,
as you pointed out in northern Alabama, was \$200,000 worth of expense
that your company put in for absolutely no result. So I just, with
temperance, would like to echo your sentiment and some pushback and
taking a look at the entire scope of what we\'re trying to accomplish
here, and how much money we\'re putting to little value going forward.

MR. GRUIS: Well, we could have done a lot of \-- made a lot of headway
on our overlays with that \$6.5 million, I can tell you that.

MR. CADE: Bill Cade from APCO, and I certainly want to make it from our
perspective, from PSAP perspective nationwide, certainly reflect the
fact that we are urging our PSAP managers around the country to be the
best informed partners in this discussion as they can be. I think
that\'s helpful to everybody, to where we have people like yourself who
are willing to have an honest discussion and talk about the expectations
over what we can get, and so on and so forth, and continue that
dialogue, I think that\'s extremely important. I think there\'s a little
reluctance on the part of PSAPs however, to be perceived as the grantors
of forbearance for long periods of time into the future. I think that\'s
got to be worked on some more.

The other piece of this, quite candidly, is that there is still a big
public education piece because how do we notify the traveler into these
areas that the device that they rely upon in Burlington doesn\'t work
that 50 miles out \-- as well at 50 miles outside of the city, so
there\'s several pieces to this that certainly APCO is interested in
pursuing in many different ways, and I certainly applaud the cooperative
experience you\'ve had, your company has had, and certainly with the
State of Vermont and others. Thank you.

MR. NEIHARDT: Just a \-- Jonas Neihardt again. Briefly, I want to touch
upon the privacy point, because I think it\'s really important. We all
deserve to have our privacy protected, not just Montana ranchers but
everybody, and for that reason, on the assisted GPS side, we designed
the chip set and the software with a functionality so that it could be
turned off by the user, and you can have the thing on, of course, if you
desire. Otherwise, you can turn it off and the GPS measurement function
will only activate if you dial 911, and that will - that cannot be
deactivated. In the case of 911, it will be assumed you want to be
found, but again, the measurement capability can be disabled at the
handset by the user, and I think I need to put that out there.

MR. GRUIS: Yes, that\'s the way I understand it. If we want to use
commercial applications, you can add that functionality to it. We have
time for just one more question from the roundtable, and then we need to
move on to our next speaker.

MR. PREST: Not a question, but just an echo of the comments that \--
first off, for Evelyn Bailey\'s comment about appreciation of your
honesty, that\'s very much noted. But also, you have provided a good
demonstration of that partnership that is required between the carriers
and the LECs and public safety, and the local governing authority.
Again, that is based upon good faith, and reasonable expectations. So
you\'re to be applauded for that partnership.

MR. GRUIS: Well, thank you. I think most of the carriers out there, and
the PSAPs and everybody are trying hard. It\'s just a long way to go.
Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thank you, Kyle. Next we\'ll hear from George
Marble. George is responsible for marketing and external affairs for the
network solutions division of the Andrew Corporation. Andrew
manufactures, markets, and implements Geometrics Wireless Location
System, a network overlay E911 wireless caller location system. Prior to
joining Andrew, he served as executive director with Bell Atlantic
International Wireless where he was responsible for planning, operations
and marketing, and he also served as executive director in technology
planning and marketing for both Bell Atlantic and AT&T, so he\'s seen
life from both sides. George?

MR. MARBLE: Let\'s see if I can remember the instructions I had about
setting this up. I think I\'ve met many of you in the past as an
employee of Grayson Wireless. Andrew Corporation became a vendor on July
15th of this year of network based location systems, our product is
called Geometrics, when it acquired Grayson wireless and all of the
other divisions of Allen Telecom.

Just to set the stage about what our product is and what our experience
is up to this point. The name of the product is Geometrics. It\'s a
wireless location system. As I mentioned, it was a product of Grayson
Wireless. It\'s a network-based system. It uses uplink TDOA or commonly
TDOA as its fundamental location technology. We are able to locate, to
overlay, angle of arrival in special cases where it\'s needed in
difficult circumstances.

It\'s compatible with all cellular and PCS technologies in use in the
U.S. and it\'s currently in service with every PCS and cellular
technology. The only wireless technology that it\'s not in service with
is IDENT, which is the air interface used by Nextel and a couple of
other carriers.

We began installing systems with our first installation in Saint Clair
County, Illinois in October two years ago, October 2001. Since then
we\'ve installed our system in over 12,000 cell sites, 34 states we
estimate that they\'re covering currently, about 13 million subscribers.
The environments that they\'re in service in are in urban, suburban,
rural and highway. Our product is offered as a turnkey system wherein we
manufacture the product, provide the equipment and the software. We
design the system for the particular application for the customer, we
install the system, and then we test it operationally and accuracy-wise.

I think that we can make a few comments that are directed particularly
at rural due to some experience that we\'ve had up to this point with
rural. We have done some implementations with tier three carriers.
We\'ve done significant implementations with tier one and to a lesser
extent, with tier two carriers, all of which have involved rural.

The system was designed to begin with, to be installed at cell site
locations, existing cell site locations, and we\'ve tried to optimize
the system so that it works as well as possible, limiting the
installations to existing cell sites. We\'ve optimized this product to
do one function, and that is locations. In order to do the location
function, it has to detect a radio wave at several sites, at several
receiving points, and we\'ve been able to make the system much more
sensitive than is the host cellular network itself, that increases or
enhances the ability of our system to detect the signal from the caller
at multiple receiving points.

In the case of TDOA, it is essential for our system to be able to
receive the signal at at least three points. When that can\'t be done,
and if the signal can be received at two points, then we can overlay
angle of arrival technology. We\'ve had to do that so far in a minimum
of cases, but nevertheless, there are cases that we can determine before
we put in a system where angle of arrival is required to achieve the
Phase Two accuracy goal.

Our system can be used to support multiple type technologies
simultaneously. That is, if a carrier is in transition going from TDMA
to GSM, they\'re able to install our system to cover their current TDMA
operation, and move that same system over to cover GSM as they implement
it. We have thousands of installations doing exactly that today. We have
systems that are currently handling TDMA, GSM, and APS. We have other
combinations where we\'re handling CDMA, APS, and 1XRTT, et cetera, et
cetera. Any mix of technologies can be handled by the system.

I think an important thing to realize is that we have the ability as
part of our design process to model specific applications given
characteristics of the carrier\'s network and the particular situation
that the carrier wants to cover, in the geography they want to cover, we
can model their system, and model overlay the performance
characteristics of our system to pre-determine what is required of our
system in the way of deployment in the particular situation, and what
kind of accuracy can be expected from that system.

It\'s an extremely important part of our provisioning process that
we\'re able to pre-determine what the accuracy is going to be of a
system, and then guarantee that if the carrier implements that system,
according to that design, then we will guarantee the accuracy, that the
system will meet the FCC\'s Phase Two requirements. Ultimately, however,
the carrier makes the decision on what to deploy, and if the carrier
makes a decision to deploy TDOA only, and the requirement is that a
combination of \-- in a particular circumstance might call for TDOA and
AOA, then that system departs from the design and cannot be expected to
meet the requirements or the accuracy that the system we designed would
achieve.

As I\'ve said before, we\'ve designed and implemented a number of
systems for rural applications. Actually we\'ve designed many more than
have been actually installed. We\'ve done this for carriers who have
contemplated the use of our system. Many of those are tier three
carriers. What we\'ve found is the following.

Each situation has its own characteristics. Every single situation has
to be studied, and an appropriate solution determined for the particular
circumstance. There is no such thing as a standard rural network. There
is no such thing as a standard geometry of the cells with respect to
each other, or of terrain, et cetera. Each circumstance requires its own
solution, and that can only be determined by modeling and engineering
ahead of time.

We\'ve determined that most of the rural situations that we\'ve studied
and that carriers have brought to us can be implemented with a geometric
solution, and met the E911 Phase Two accuracy requirements. As I said
before, there is no standard case for rural, and we inform carriers in
that design process, or as a result of that design process, if we don\'t
believe that our system is going to be able to produce Phase Two
accuracy, then we notify the carriers before they install the system.

Our installations to date have all been at existing cell sites. We\'ve
implemented no equipment at supplementary receiving points. 97 percent,
slightly over 97 percent of the installations to date have been pure
TDOA. Only three percent have been angle of arrival, 300 out of roughly
12,000, a few installations more than 12,000.

The term string of pearls is used a lot when referring to rural
situations and particularly to highway coverage. In our experience,
there is very little true string of pearl, there is a very small
inventory of true string of pearl situations at large. In general,
highways generally curve enough to produce the requisite geometry in
networks that is required for a TDOA solution. If, however, our system
has to meet accuracy or, I\'m sorry, has to solve a true string of
pearls situation, then we can implement angle of arrival in combination
with TDOA in order to produce a solution.

We\'ve also found that rural networks tend to be clustered around
population centers as you might expect, and TDOA alone can solve the
problem in most of these cases, and certainly in very many of these
cases.

So, in summary, we have implemented our system successfully and that
means by the E911 Phase Two criteria in rural environments. We have the
ability to predict ahead of implementation exactly what kind of accuracy
should be expected over the study area, over the implementation area, of
our system according to a specific design that we would recommend that
carriers implement for our systems.

There is no, as I said before, standard rural network. There is no
standard geometry. There is no standard topology or morphology, and each
case has to be studied before a determination can be made that there is
a solution or that there is not a solution. However, as a final bullet
point, we can say that our system can meet the Phase 911 Two
requirements for many rural situations.

I just want to digress from what I had prepared, because I think left
out of this is the question and addressed somewhat, is the question of
what if the signal can truly only be seen by one cell site, and that
cell site is equipped with a geometrics equipment. If that\'s the case,
then our system is not capable of producing an E911-2 compliant
solution. However, we\'ve found that that is the case in only a very
small minority of the situations that we\'ve been confronted with,
either by systems that we\'ve actually installed, or by designs that
we\'ve done for potential applications.

I\'ll be glad to answer questions that you may have.

MR. HOLDER: Allen Holder with Lincoln County, West Virginia. The
equipment that you mentioned I think is exactly what we\'re seeing in
our rural location, that is not meeting those standards as you spoke of,
but you are not using angle of arrival. So if we go back to the carrier
and we ask them to look at the installation of angle of arrival, can we
expect to see a marked improvement from what we see now?

MR. MARBLE: I really can\'t answer your question without knowing the
exact circumstance. If the caller is \-- if the caller can only be \--
if their signal can only be received at one cell site, then angle of
arrival would not solve that situation. So I would need to know the
exact circumstance you\'re talking about.

MR. HOLDER: I guess I\'m in that minority you spoke about then. Thank
you.

MR. MARBLE: Yes, sir?

MR. PETERSON: I have the same concern because I\'m struggling with the
fact you\'re saying that there\'s very few places where only one site is
the serving carrier, and you can only see one site. I can guarantee you
most of my sites, one site is the only site you\'re going to see, and I
would have to say that across much of rural Montana and I would think
Alaska, you would find that to be the case, so I struggle with the fact
that you\'re not seeing very many locations where only one site can be
seen.

MR. MARBLE: Well, I can only speak for the cases that have been brought
in front of us, and of all of the cases that have been brought to us so
far by carriers, and those are the ones \-- those are the only people
who can bring us these examples, we\'ve only seen one where we didn\'t
have, absolutely didn\'t have some solution. That was a case of
multiple, very isolated sites. I think \-- and we informed the carrier
that we didn\'t have a solution, and gave them whatever information they
needed to inform the FCC of that case. Yes, sir?

MR. GASAWAY: I\'m Wayne Gasaway with Advantage Cellular, and we have
successfully deployed the network based system in Tennessee, but we are
somewhat unique. We do have hills, but we also happen to have the only
mountain in middle Tennessee, right in the middle of our service area,
which makes it a lot more noticeable and makes it effective a 1300 foot
tall tower, but we have deployed it, it is working, but it took more
than just a combination or the technology in the number of cell sites.

I want to bring another point into this, the economics involved. It was
very expensive, but make another point, the state in Tennessee was very
cooperative and we were able to work together to get it done, but we did
do it with a network-based system that we feel meets the FCC criteria.
Now we do have some isolated spots out on the end where it\'s maybe not
as accurate as it should be, but we feel like, and we\'re still, we have
five more cell sites that we\'re planning to build out. We have about 40
cell sites now in an eight-county area, so it\'s fairly highly populated
with cell sites, but it works.

MR. MARBLE: We remember that. That was a challenging one. Any other
questions?

MR. POMERANTZ: A real quick comment. As the AGPS phones come onto the
market, some of the carriers that are less than satisfied with some of
the performance, the equipment and the investment that has been
deployed, in many cases, I believe, could probably be viewed as additive
to AGPS. While the processing is not 100 percent meeting the FCC
requirements for accuracy and availability, there is some valuable
information that is being collected, and that information, combined with
AGPS, perhaps could render position in those areas where it is not in an
affordable way. So just to keep that in the back of your mind. There is
some hope that maybe you\'ll be able to get some return on some of that
stuff. I wouldn\'t throw it out quite yet.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: I think I\'ll ask our next panelists to come up
if they could, and we\'re going to switch out again some of the
roundtable participants. Well, we\'ve heard about the different roles of
shareholders and different types of technology that are out there in
rural markets, and now we want to turn to the cost of deployment, and
how small rural wireless carriers and PSAPs can handle those costs.
We\'ve got a great panel with a lot of experience to lead us through
this important discussion, and someone you may not know, but we\'ve
added Ed Cameron from the RUS to our panel, and that\'s not reflected on
the agenda. So we have a lot of speakers here. We\'re running a little
bit behind schedule, but that\'s okay. We may go over our scheduled time
for lunch because this just underlines how important these issues are,
and we want to really get through this in some detail. So first, I\'d
like to ask our new members of the roundtable to introduce themselves,
anybody who wasn\'t on the earlier panel.

MR. WINEGRAM: Dave Winegram, Motorola. I\'m with the GTSS Global Telecom
solution sector. We handle infrastructure worldwide and for CDMA for
North America.

MR. MCCRACKEN: Kevin McCracken from Nortel Networks wireless division.
We sell wireless infrastructure to the carriers for CDMA GSM as well as
third-generation technologies. We\'re based in Richardson, Texas.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: That\'s it. Well, we have four speakers. I\'m
going to start with Art Prest. He has over 35 years of experience in the
telecom industry, which includes stints at Bell Labs and Western
Electric. After leaving the Bell system, he worked in management roles
at Polaroid and Telco Systems Fiberoptics Corporation. In 1994 he moved
to Washington to work for CTIA as vice-president for science and
technology, and during that time served on the FCC\'s network
reliability council steering committee and on several NRCs themselves.
Currently Art is vice president and chief technology officer for Alpine
PCS and RFB Cellular, two independently owned world wireless carriers.
Art is responsible for technical and regulatory issues for the two
companies, and he was recently appointed to the board of directors for
the Rural Cellular Association. Art?

MR. PREST: Than you, Jonathan. Before the session began, I was talking
with Ed Hall from ATIS and Doug Roland from Lucent, and Doug stood up
and he said, have you two guys shrunk, and I started reflecting back on
the fact that I\'ve been working on wireless E911 location since 1994,
when I was 6\'4\" and 25 years old, and had blonde hair, and I started
looking around the room yesterday and I looked around again today, and I
see some familiar faces.

When this thing first started we could put everybody that was involved
probably in my SUV. It was Ed Hall, myself, Mike Alshul, Jim Hobson,
Mary Boyd, and John Melcher, and I look around now and I see all these
new faces, and I see the progress that we\'ve made and it actually is
very exciting for me to see the progress we\'ve made.

Today I\'m going to talk on behalf of RCA, an association of about 100
rural wireless carriers covering over 15 million POPs across the United
States. Most of these members were early entrants in the market, and
they have survived because of their focus on the needs of the rural
carriers. Many RCA members continue to operate effectively using analog
and TDMA networks which you\'ve heard a lot about this morning, and
although a rapid conversion with CDMA is not likely, most of our members
are making plans for CDMA or GSM overlays, even if they have not yet
installed such equipment.

Some of this is going to be beating a dead horse because you\'ve heard a
lot more about this than I anticipated we would be hearing, but there
are three major challenges facing the rural carriers. One is achieving
the FCC accuracy requirement, second is paying for the FCC \-- I\'m
sorry, the Phase Two location systems, and third is finding the
resources within a small carrier to implement them.

As indicated in Dale Hatfield\'s report, 911 networks in rural areas
don\'t lend themselves easily to the network-based location systems, the
long distances between cell sites, and the linear network topologies
make triangulation difficult. That\'s exacerbated by the fact that there
are no handset-based solutions for legacy and longitudinal networks or
even for the new GSM networks. To complicate maters even more, many
states don\'t have reimbursement plans, while other states have plans
that only provide funds based on how much they contribute to the fund,
and finally, like my company, we don\'t have the deep resource to make
all this happen.

You\'ve heard a lot about the accuracy this morning, so I\'m not going
to spend a lot of time on this. I think the most important part of this
is the 95 percent penetration that we need by December 31, 2005. Those
of us that are working on this really want to make this happen. We think
the handset-based solution is the way to make it happen, but given that
date, it really makes it difficult for us to achieve that date, which
leads us to some problems here, and that is should a carrier dedicate
its limited capital resources to installing network-based equipment that
will not produce accuracy results that the PSAPs really need, or should
cell sites be turned off to avoid a violation of the rules where there
is no hope of good location accuracy, or should a waiver request be
filed seeking more time, perhaps another year or two, to allow for a
CDMA or GSM overlay to be completed in conjunction with a handset-based
solution.

On the subject of cost recovery, RCA members have been severely
handicapped by the removal of carrier cost recovery as a condition to
obligations to provide Phase Two service. We believe that wireless
carriers have a right to cost recovery, wireless carriers bear the brunt
of more than 80 percent of the cost of providing E911 Phase Two service
and yet, is the only participant that isn\'t guaranteed reimbursement of
his costs. In addition, small carriers typically do not have the pricing
power in their markets due to the effectiveness of large carriers\'
nationwide roaming calling plans. This means in many states small
carriers\' Phase Two installation costs with the other cost recovery
plan or the ability to pass those costs on to a small subscriber base.
As a result, Phase Two costs become a large part of our capital budgets
meaning other service improvements, such as improvement in coverage,
must be delayed. We add in the cost of COLEA, local number portability,
and other unfunded mandates and the future of rural wireless carriers
becomes bleak.

Now let\'s look at a real life example. This is my company in Michigan.
We\'re one of the few privately held companies still in existence. We
serve 256,000 POPs, over 12,400 square miles with an average population
density of 21 people per square mile. We\'re just completing Phase One
service to the 17 PSAPs. That\'s 15,600 POPs per PSAP in northern
Michigan. I\'m proud to say we were the first wireless carrier in the
state of Michigan to provide Phase One, and we\'re just about completing
that today. We\'ve got 70 cell sites switched off a Motorola switch for
which there is no network-based solution available today, although
Andrew Corporation is working on a solution for it. In our case, a
handset solution is our only option, and although there\'s a wireless
carrier reimbursement program in Michigan, reimbursement is limited to
125 percent of what we contribute to the fund. Of the 53 cents that we
collect each month, 25 cents goes into the wireless carrier
reimbursement fund. However, capital expenditure or cap ex for a
network-based solution, if there were one, would require 21 years of
contributions for RFB to be reimbursed for its implementation, and that
assumes there\'s no monthly operating costs or op ex. You throw in op
ex, the op ex can be two to three times what we actually contribute to
the fund, and we can get reimbursed from the fund.

However, there is a clause in the state law which I\'ll talk about that
we are working to see if we can collect additional money for the fund to
make this happen. Now let\'s zoom in on my first Phase Two request,
which happens in Mackinac County. I know it looks like Mackinac. It took
me a long time to realize it was Mackinac. It\'s in the upper peninsula
of Michigan. We serve 12,000 POPs over 1,000 square miles. Note the
exact green color showing zero population per square mile over large
areas of the country. Those are mainly 80 to 100 foot pine trees, which
are not real friendly to propagation.

We have six cell sites marked with red Xs that serve 720 subscribers
having 1,020 phones, plus roamers from all over the state. As I said, we
collect 53 cents, 25 cents goes into the fund. That\'s about \$3,000 a
year times 1.25. Say \$4,000 a year I contribute to the fund that\'s
reimbursable. I don\'t think I have to crunch a lot more numbers to
illustrate the kind of problem that we\'re facing. Fortunately there is
a clause in that state law that allows us to collect more. We\'re going
to be pursuing that, as I indicated. However, that only covers the
capital and as I said, the op ex could be two to three times what it\'s
going to cost me on a monthly basis. I can\'t recover that.

I\'d like to point out that this is our first Phase Two request, and
therefore averaging it is not an option. I can\'t \-- there\'s nothing
to average it with that\'s better. Lastly, I want to point out that
because all of the cell sites are on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and
one is on an island, it\'s kind of difficult to locate additional cell
sites. I haven\'t found buoys that will support them, so \--

In conclusion, RCA suggests that the public safety community and the FCC
be receptive to timeline relief requested for RCA members and other
rural carriers who face the choice of wasteful capital expenditures on a
network-based solution that might not be effective, or having to turn
off cell sites to avoid a violation at the same time unfortunately
cutting off basic 911 service, or going forward as the economic
circumstances allow with a CDMA or GSM overlay after which a
handset-based solution for Phase Two will be available.

To make all this happen in the absence of federal funding, we need
protected delta self cost recovery without the threat of lawsuits. What
I mean by delta, protected delta self cost recovery is some type of
legislative definition that says that wireless carriers have the right
to put a line item on their bill to pay for 911, and delta being if you
have a program in the state that is collecting money, then you can
combine the two to help pay for these expenses.

Assisted GPS which we talked a lot about today. Those kind of phones by
2004 or 2005 are absolutely necessary, particularly for GSM, and
relaxation, extension or elimination of the December 31, 2005 date for
95 percent penetration into our consumer customer base, and finally,
timeline relief for worldwide wireless carriers pursuing CDMA or GSM
network overlays, or legacy networks, coupled with a plan to deploy a
handset-based solution. Maybe in this way we can light the end of the
tunnel together and stop tripping over each other in the dark. Any
questions? Yes, Mike.

MR. CURTIS: Mike Curtis with Curtis & Associates, and I just wanted to
amplify on one point that you made. When we were talking about the AGPS
handsets that are becoming available and going to be available, we need
to keep focused on the fact that the current commission rules said that
you had to start selling those handsets this past September, so even if
you\'re an AMPS and TDMA network provider migrating to CDMA where
handsets are currently available, you could not start selling those
compatible handsets because they would not work on your network as it
existed in that point in time, so as we\'re focusing on trying to reach
solutions, we need to keep focused on the fact that there needs to be a
realization that the rural carriers need to rely upon the handset
solutions, and they need to be given a realistic time frame in which to
implement those handsets.

MR. PREST: I agree with that. Yes?

MR. MCCRACKEN: Yes. It\'s Kevin McCracken from Nortel Networks, and just
to clarify some concern about the cap ex, I can confirm from a wireless
network infrastructure perspective that as far as the cap ex required to
implement assisted GPS, it\'s significantly lower including the cost of
the central office equipment required to do position determination for
AGPS, not just cap ex but also up front deployment costs as well as
ongoing operations and maintenance. We\'ve seen this through several
CDMA deployments as well as deployments within the IDENT environment
today for AGPS.

MR. PREST: For rural carriers there is a problem though, even for an
AGPS system, and that is the fact that the PDE is pretty expensive. The
only solution for a rural carrier is to outsource that to either Intrado
or TCS, but that dramatically raises your op ex, which puts us \--
that\'s why I said in a handset solution our op ex actually exceeds what
we can recover from the state.

MR. MCCRACKEN: Right, and I know just on the cap ex perspective for the
PDE, that is something that I\'m directly involved with, about 17 GSM
prospective customers at the tier three level today, and that is
something that we have significantly addressed in the last three to six
months as far as repackaging and driving costs out of our PDE solution
to be able to offer it to the tier two and three customers, so we do
have \-- we\'re making movement in the right direction from that
perspective.

MR. PREST: Good. That\'s good to hear. Questions? Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thanks a lot. Next we are going to hear from
Mike Amarosa, who is withe TruePosition. He retired as deputy
commissioner of the New York City Police Department five years ago, and
while he was with the NYPD he built and managed the nation\'s largest
911 public safety answering center, and implemented new wireless
technology for 40,000 members of the NYPD. Since retiring, which he\'s
not really retired, he\'s worked at TruePosition, an E911 wireless
solution provider where he currently is the senior vice president for
public affairs. He brings 30 years of law enforcement and communications
expertise to the wireless industry, which includes being a former member
of the FCC\'s Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee. He has also
testified before Congress on these issues, and we\'re glad to have him
here today.

MR. AMAROSA: Thank you and good morning to everyone. I\'ve been asked to
talk about the challenges that we see that are faced in the rural
environment and TruePosition has been approaching this with a different
point of view, I think. We are deploying on a network solutions right
now, TDOA, with our ROA capability as well, and doing it with nationwide
carriers, and we\'ve gained a lot of information as we\'ve done this and
some of those nationwide deployments have also addressed rural areas.

In fact, in the technology room or exhibit room as you call it, next
door, we do have a live feed that\'s coming in from the Chicago area
which includes a section outside of Chicago which encompasses all of
Schaumburg, which is in a lot of cases part of that is a suburban area,
but a lot of it is also very rural and some farm area is there. It\'s a
GSM network and it\'s doing quite well, and you can go in there and see
actually how it works. But we have looked and done a lot in these areas,
and done a lot of mapping and prediction with our modeling and we found
some things that I think I\'d like to share with you this morning, some
observations that we\'ve seen.

The accuracy of the location which we\'ve talked about a lot is really
\-- is dependent upon many, many different variables that exist, the
cell siting, the spacing, the distancing between the cell sites, the
geographic distribution and the orientation of where these cell sites
are also play a major role in how we are able to determine accuracy, the
RF propagation, terrain is a major, major factor and then any multi-path
issues that may exist, and you\'ve heard our folks from Tennessee talk
about the mountain in the middle of the state which can dramatically
affect it, and the mobile unit\'s power in and of itself, the transmit
capability has presented a major challenge in reaching accuracy
requirements that the FCC set forth.

What we found is that where those cell sites are separated by less than
ten miles, the network-based TDOA solutions generally meet the FCC
requirements. Where there are greater than the 10 miles, then you start
to get into some issues, and they often can meet it, and then you\'ve
got to use things that we\'ve called supplemental technologies. You know
the string of pearls issues that George talked about earlier that don\'t
exist in total, you know, actuality, they\'re out there and in a lot of
cases the angle of arrival, which is the antenna ray is very effective
at doing that, in some cases recommendations have to be made for
supplemental sites, and in some cases where you\'re going to have the
one cell site situations, you\'re not going to be able to meet that at
all.

How do you address that from a financial point of view? You know,
you\'ve got fewer cell sites in the urban areas to make location
calculations which is a major issue, and I think you\'ve heard a lot
about that. The added expenses that are associated with supplemental
technologies, especially where there\'s poor cell site density or
there\'s geographic issues that have to be addressed, and the low volume
purchases.

What we\'ve recommended in some of our cases when we\'ve talked to some
of the rural carriers, is a couple of things. The ability to form a
cooperative for the purpose of cheating some economics of scale which
can be associated with these volume purchases and with extensive
deployments that you can do in adjacent areas and in the same areas.

There\'s a common network that can be shared as well, which we\'ve
offered in a couple of locations as possible solutions. Again, the cost
recovery which I think we\'ve heard a lot about over the last day or so,
some 40 states have it. How extensive is it? Art talked to you about how
his is only based upon certain reimbursement criteria, and it depends on
the different states and you have 40 different solutions, and I think
one of the things that we learned about yesterday which we had seen was
that there\'s federal funding programs that exist, especially with the
United States Department of Agriculture. He talked about \$650 million
in granting that\'s available through the Department of Agriculture as
an adjunct to the Homeland Security, so that there is maybe some light
at the end of the tunnel that can address some of these areas.

Is it an easy solution? No. Is it an easy way to go? No. But there is a
way I think of getting there, and that\'s some of the things that we\'ve
found in some of the ways that True Position has looked at this issue.
I\'ll be happy to take any questions. Yes?

MR. McMILLAN: John McMillan with Carolina West Wireless. I just have a
comment regarding the funding from the Department of Agriculture. Our
company has just recently completed a funding loan and the time frame
for dealing with the Department of Agriculture really does not fit into
the FCC timeline and requirements. It took our company one-and-a-half to
two years to complete this loan process, and the time required is just
too long to really make it very useful for these applications.

MR. AMAROSA: Okay. Anyone else? Thank you very much.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thank you, Mike. Next we have Richard Taylor.
Richard is currently the president of NENA and has been intimately
involved in these issues for more than a decade. In his day job he
serves as executive director of the North Carolina Wireless 911 Board.
He\'s the first person to hold that post in the state. Richard is
responsible for assisting and overseeing the 100 PSAPs throughout the
state of North Carolina.

Prior to his role with the state, Richard was communications director
for the City of New Bern in North Carolina, and one of his many
accomplishments is his work on the passage of North Carolina\'s Wireless
911 Act back in 1998. He was involved in every aspect of that bill,
which includes provisions guaranteeing full cost recovery for PSAPs and
guaranteeing that wireless carriers could recoup any money spent to
upgrade their systems to make them E911 capable. Richard?

MR. TAYLOR: I\'m not sure if however is doing the typing if they need
interpretation between Mike Amarosa and myself, but good morning.
Actually it\'s afternoon now and it\'s kind of a scary through to stand
before you guys and know that I\'m standing between you and lunch, so
I\'ll try to keep my remarks short. One thing that I will identify
myself, Congressman Upton had the opportunity of pointing me out
yesterday and did such a great job of letting you know that North
Carolina yes, is one of those evil people that raided the fund. But just
as Paul Harvey would say, let me tell you the rest of the story.

Unfortunately North Carolina this past June, just like many states, did
run into a budget crunch. They\'ve had a budget crunch for several
years, and unfortunately they finally looked at our 911 fund because
that 911 fund was so huge and because that 911 fund was not being used.
As the Commissioner pointed out, back in \`97 I started working with our
state legislature to create the wireless 911 surcharge. At that time,
and I\'ll never forget standing before our legislature, and they asked
me, well, how are you going to do this? And I told this senator who
reminds me of Foghorn Leghorn as he sat back in his chair, sir, I don\'t
know we\'re going to do it, and he says, well, how much is it going to
cost? And I said, sir, I don\'t know how much it\'s going to cost, and
he looked at me and in some of his southern vernacular which I\'ll not
repeat this morning for this crowd, he said, you have got to be either
the stupidest man or the bravest man or a combination of both to stand
before us in an election year, ask for money for something that you
don\'t know how you\'re going to do it, and you don\'t know how much
it\'s going to cost. We walked away that day with a surcharge in North
Carolina on wireless devices at 80 cents.

We have full cost recovery, meaning we will pay the cost to the wireless
providers for the delta in the handsets, we pay for your LMUs. Our
statute says if it\'s required for you to deploy Phase One and Phase Two
911 we will pay for that in North Carolina. After the midnight raid, if
you will, this past June, we were quickly called into action with my
friends at NENA and we were able to get a technical corrections bill
instituted during that week and we are proud to say that not one PSAP in
North Carolina has lost one penny of that money, not one carrier has had
one invoice not paid and will not go unpaid. So everyone will get their
money.

But we do have a large fund, and the reason that fund is so large, as I
mentioned earlier, is because it\'s not being used. That creates a great
challenge for us from the state perspective. We\'ve had that fund now
for five years, and we are still trying to get carriers to deploy. Gregg
C. John from Carolina West Wireless here, I must say Carolina West
Wireless was our first carrier to be 100 percent deployed in every
county that is in his service area in North Carolina with Phase One.
They didn\'t stop and ask questions. They just said, what do we need to
do and they went out and did it. They\'re working on Phase Two right now
and I applaud companies like John\'s.

But in my position as the state coordinator I\'ve also had to work with
other wireless carriers. Another carrier that comes to mind was real
interesting is they worked on their Phase One, and we were having our
Phase Two meeting and they had a great timeline laid out, and I was
getting excited. I mean, I was just overjoyed. Here was a wireless
carrier, a rural carrier, that was going to do Phase Two, and after he
got through with his presentation that within six months we would have
Phase Two from that carrier, I asked the stupidest question, and I still
kick myself for asking, and I said, what about your waiver? And he said,
can we get waivers? Today he has still not deployed Phase Two in North
Carolina.

But then I have other rural carriers that, and I\'m not picking on rural
carriers, I\'m just trying to relay our experiences. This past year I
called up our contact for that company and I said, you know, we\'ve got
Phase One requests now that are over two years old you have yet to
deploy, and he said, oh, I\'m sorry, we meant to tell you, our company
decided not to participate. What an education issue for wireless
carriers as well as for our PSAPs.

So having this fund available has created a lot of challenges. We\'re
willing to work with our carriers. We know it\'s hard. We know it\'s
difficult, but one of the things that North Carolina is very proud of is
we\'ve got some great legislation.  We are here to work with you. We are
here to cover your costs. We do not expect anybody to do Phase One or
Phase Two at a loss. It is for the public good and we\'re willing to pay
that, and I know there\'s other states out there who feel the same way.
Cost recovery is a big issue. It\'s not just a little issue here and
there, and it\'s one of those things that we do need to address from a
national perspective.

Real quickly I\'ll mention, I said something about training. Another big
issue that we have run into, not with carriers, but with PSAPs, and
it\'s not just with PSAP managers. We heard it yesterday, and we\'ve
heard it this morning already. Those telecommunicators, the men and the
women who are sitting there actually answering that call, they have a
fear factor of wireless 911. In fact, I\'ve had many tell me, I wish
they had never heard of it. But we have figured out that that fear
factor can be eliminated if we go out, reach those telecommunicators and
educate them, what is wireless Phase One, Phase Two. What is all this
data that you have on the screen? I\'m proud to say in North Carolina we
started a program this past August. We are going to every single PSAP,
all 125 primary PSAPs in North Carolina, and we are having classes for
every single telecommunicator, a six-hour class, explaining to them what
is 911 wireless Phase One, wireless Phase Two, what does the data mean
on this screen, what does wireless 911 mean to you as a call taker, as a
dispatcher, as an individual working in public safety?

So education is a big issue, money is a big issue, and we\'re here to
work with you and we understand the situations, but we\'re here to work
with you and make it work for all of us. Thank you. I will entertain any
questions or I will entertain.

MS. BARTON: I\'m Jeannie Barton from the FCC. My question for you is, if
you\'ve got full cost recovery, if you\'re educating your PSAPs, what do
you think the problem is?

MR. TAYLOR: Jeannie, we keep asking that very same question. Again,
it\'s like the one carrier that said he opted not to participate. You
know, we\'re having a hard time understanding why we\'ve done all the
right things, and we are still not fully deployed. We look at Phase One,
and I measure Phase One a little differently in our state. I look at
every single carrier and every single county. I just don\'t say if
we\'ve got one carrier deployed, does that count as 100 percent because
he may have carrier B and she may have carrier A, and how is that fair
to say 100 percent? So we\'re looking \-- right now we have about 80
percent deployment of just Phase One. We still have counties that do not
have Phase One because of LEC issues, and we\'re continuing to work with
LECs.

We\'re doing everything we possibly can and we\'re still throwing our
hands up saying, gosh, we\'re giving the money, we\'re giving you this,
we\'re giving you that, why are we not getting a response? We have that
very same question. I would love to find some answers. That\'s one of
the reasons I\'m here yesterday and today is to get answers.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Thank you very much. I would send you to lunch,
but I think there\'s somebody else coming. Remind me to think twice
about proving any waivers in North Carolina. You know, next, we talked
about mana from heaven from the RUS, and we brought Ed Cameron here
before us today so we could tell you about what they have to offer. Ed
Cameron is with the RUS. He\'s the director of the Rural Utility
Services advanced services division. This division is responsible for
the agency\'s telecom universal service activities and other aspects of
it. Most recently, he authored \"USDA\'S Comments to the FCC and the
States on Universal Service\", and other issues of important to rural
telecom customers. He has been with RUS for a long time. He represents
RUS on the telecom program on the network subcommittee on
telecommunications and he\'s been with the agency for 33 years, which
includes six years as a telephone field engineer in Louisiana, Arkansas
and Texas. So Ed, thanks for being with us.

MR. CAMERON: I\'m the guy that\'s probably responsible for those
two-year delays in getting funding out, and I just want to stand up here
and take responsibility. We just began to finance rural cellular
communication systems just about two-and-a-half years ago. We put out a
new regulation. It was a considerable revision of our old regulations
which kept us pretty much financing only wire line facilities, and we
were trying to evolve, and so I believe since we changed the rules,
we\'ve made about 15 loans to rural cellular PCS providers.

The biggest problem we had, we have a statutory prohibition against
lending for facilities that duplicate the facilities of others. That is
the big problem with our lending for cellular facilities because this is
a competitive industry. So we have had to do a lot of very careful and
creative legal construction to get to the point where we can finance
rural cellular properties, and I would be the first to say that the
first few loans that came in took forever for us to work our way
through, and more recently we have been moving the cellular loans
faster, we\'ve looked at a couple in the last maybe within the last
three months and I think they hadn\'t been in house too long when they
got to us. But I want to put some facts in front of you and then let you
go to lunch.

I don\'t want to read the slides, but I\'m going to mention to you that
the applications we\'ve been looking at have been very difficult. Not
all of them, just some of them. The people that come to us for financing
are probably the smaller companies that have had some of the
difficulties that I list here. So this is not probably a cross-section
of the problems.

Many of the applicants have been vendor-financed and this has given,
this financing gave a lot of companies a good chance to get started, but
the vendors were very optimistic, and that financing is often not
renewable, you can\'t get more money from those guys because in some
cases they\'re not especially strong right now either.

The revenue \-- the growth picture. I\'ll go into the growth picture a
little bit. The growth picture we see represents fairly flat growth and
that hurts these loan applications. The network elements that people are
proposing are not going to improve the growth picture much. They\'re
going to maybe their network evolution, their coverage extension which
means building on down the road. You\'ve already covered the town,
you\'ve already covered where the most people live, and where they spend
most of their time, so you\'re building on down the road. You\'re not
really going to pick up a lot of new customers as a result of ths
investment.

Feature enhancements. We find that small rural companies are competing
with carriers that can provide larger calling areas for the same rates
or lower rates, and small companies don\'t have the advantage of very
much cost averaging, so that\'s a burden.

Financing E911 facilities, we can finance anything the borrower is
willing to own, so we can\'t finance handsets, and as you evolve to more
expensive handset technology, then you\'re going to have a higher
percentage of your facility that we can\'t finance. We can\'t let these
companies go out of business, because all the carriers provide services
through roaming over these cell sites, and over the cell sites and over
the cell sites that we are building with the new loans.

So I get to the bottom line. Where is universal service support? We have
carriers, every day, every few days, we see another carrier somewhere in
the country, a rural carrier that\'s been declared an eligible
telecommunications carrier by often the FCC, and those carriers are
going to receive much needed support to serve some very high cost areas.
But the system is flawed. The per customer support is based on the wire
line carrier\'s cost per customer. So the key connection is not there
between incentive to invest and support received, and so my last slide
is a rerun of our January 4, \`02 comment to the FCC, it\'s time to
separate these systems. It\'s time to base the support on the wireless
carrier\'s cost and give wireless carriers incentive to invest. That\'s
it. Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ADELSTEIN: Well thanks a lot. We\'ve heard some real
challenges facing rural America and we\'ve heard about some real
solutions, and I think getting this done, and getting it done right
isn\'t a choice though, it\'s a necessity, and it\'s a matter of life
and death, so I really appreciate all of you taking the time out of your
busy schedules to be with us here and to share so many insights, so much
good input. With that, I\'ll turn this over to our own Lauren Patrich.
She\'ll have some announcements and tell us about where to go for lunch,
because you don\'t need GPS to find lunch, you just need Lauren.

MS. PATRICH: I also want to make sure that people know that we\'ve
brought down a couple of boxes of the competition report that was
released recently on CMRS services. They\'re in the back, the blue, the
bright turquoise blue publication on the back table there. Feel free to
take one.

I want to remind everyone that there are technology demonstrations that
are a prelude to our panel later this afternoon on the future of public
safety communications and emergency response in particular in the next
ten years. There is a sign, it\'s right out, sort of right past the door
on this side, just down the hallway, a few steps away, so please go take
a look, and if any of the designee from a governor or a tribe did not
receive a list of their PSAPs in a manila folder when they checked in
yesterday, please let me or one of the other FCC staff know and we\'ll
connect you with that.

Then, obviously, everyone who was here yesterday knows that we have two
cafeterias on the courtyard level, which is the CY level in the
elevator. You can get there from either of the elevator bays, but if you
have a red visitor badge like Ernie has right there with the V, you\'re
going to have give it to the security guard and then you\'ll be able to
reclaim it when you come back in. With that, we\'ll see you at 2:15 to
talk about NRIC VII.

(Whereupon the foregoing matter went off the record at 12:58 p.m. and
went back on the record at 2:17 p.m.)

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Hello and welcome back. Hope you enjoyed your
lunch. If you\'re just joining us now, welcome to this afternoon\'s
session on technical issues surrounding E911. I\'m Jeff Goldthorp with
the Office of Engineering and Technology here at the FCC, and today we
will be talking about a number of the technical issues that you may have
heard a little bit about over the last day or so, and we\'ll go into
those in some more detail.

A lot of you have probably already heard that we\'re planning on
rechartering the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council this
January. One of the focus areas of the new charter will be E911 systems
engineering, and specifically, the technical issue, the systems
engineering issues that were revealed in Dale Hatfield\'s report. We
learned a lot from that report and we want to pursue those ideas further
in the NRIC as it\'s known, and we\'ll have a speaker, we\'ll hear a
talk today to give us an update on the charter, where we are on the
charter, for NRIC VII. It\'s the seventh NRIC.

Another of the issues that I think is probably on a lot of your minds is
methods for determining the accuracy of E911 location systems, and I
know there has been a lot of activity in the industry on that, in
particular in ESIF, and we\'ll have a speaker this afternoon covering
that issue as well, covering those issues and where the ESIF is in their
process. So, each of the speakers will have about 20 minutes of prepared
remarks, and then we\'ll have ten minutes after each for questions, but
let me first introduce John Healy.

John Healy is a telecommunications systems specialist here at the FCC
where he works on reliability issues in connection with E911 and SS7.
Before that, he was chief scientist of network reliability at Telcordia
Technologies, and today he is here today to give us an update on where
we are with the NRIC VII charter. John?

MR. HEALY: Thank you, Jeff. Again, I\'m going to be talking about the
Network Reliability and Interoperability Committee, our Council, and
it\'s the letters we use for our NRIC and what NRIC is a federal
advisory committee that is chartered by the FCC and what I\'m going to
be doing to day is providing you first a little bit of background on why
we\'re rechartering the NRIC with this particular focus. I\'m also going
to spend a little bit of time spending some on background on what NRIC
is and what it has bee doing and then I\'m going to close with a number
of the issues that we think should be addressed by the next NRIC or NRIC
VII.

As Jeff said, there were a number of conclusions from the Hatfield
Report and one of the major conclusions was that the E911 network is
kind of a kluge. In many ways it\'s kind of a magnificent kluge, it\'s
kind of ingenious, but it still is a kluge. For wireless E911 they
essentially put a bunch of extra equipment and a bunch of extra network
connections right on top of the existing wire line E911 network.

Another conclusion of the Hatfield Report was that the signaling that\'s
used in many portions of the E911 network is really kind of outdated. A
lot of it still uses CAMA signaling and that goes way, way, way back.
One of the other conclusions of the Hatfield Report was that there was a
lack of standardized tests for the accuracy requirements that the FCC
had come out with, and Gustavo is going to be talking a little bit about
that later today.

Probably the major conclusion from the Hatfield Report was this bottom
line in red, a real systems education needed to make sure that five
years down the road we don\'t want people saying the E911 network is the
kluge of all kluges. We would like them to believe that it has actually
been designed to be operative in the year 2010, for example.

This is a diagram of the wire line E911 network. I\'m sure all of you
have seen something like it. The reason why I\'m show it is I just want
to stress that it really \-- even this network is a little bit of a
kluge. When you make a 911 call, the call goes to an end office, then
it\'s routed to an E911 tandem. The E911 tandem then has to decide which
PSAP to send it to. Based on the calling number, it searches a database,
the selective routing database, and it may go down to the ALI database
to two depending on the structure of the network, and it picks the
appropriate PSAP. Then the PSAP has to query the ALI databases directly
and get the location information.

You know, if this was a \-- you know, the way most of us would think a
network like this would be designed is you just pass all the information
directly from one link from the E911 tandem to the PSAP, not to have to
have two separate links for an E911 call to actually be processed
correctly.

Well, with wireless E911, and by the way, this is just kind of a general
schematic of what happens, there\'s \-- it starts even looking more and
more like a kluge, and so what happens here is that when a wireless
customer makes a phone call, it goes through a cell tower, which I have
not depicted here, and the it eventually goes to a mobile switching
center, an MSC. All kind of things then happen.

In the non-call associated routing or signaling, I\'m sorry, or an NCAS
system, what happens is they send an ESRD, an emergency service routing
digit, down through the SS7 network to the mobile positioning center.
What\'s interesting about that here is that all that \-- that particular
thing identifies the sector, or the cell sector, for the particular
phone call, but the location information, of course, is not known at
this point in time.

What then happens is the MPC sends an emergency service routing key back
up to the mobile switching center, and that will allow the E911 tandem
to identify which PSAP to send the call to, because the ESRK is then
forwarded to the E911 tandem, and then the SRDB database is searched and
the ESRK is forwarded to the appropriate PSAP. But the PSAP at this
point in time doesn\'t have the calling number, nor does it have
anything related to the location of the call.

Phase One information is passed usually immediately from the MPC to the
ALI database. It passes the location, kind of a general idea of the
location information, and then it also passes the calling number. So you
see that the information going to the PSAP follows a relatively
convoluted route. It\'s actually kind of an ingenious route, but it is a
relatively convoluted route.

The MPC, to get the Phase Two information, has to send a query to the
PDE, the position determining equipment, which then sends messages
through the mobile switching center up back to the telephone, the cell
phone, to get sometimes the GPS information, sometimes it\'s other types
of information, triangulation information. The information then goes
back to the PDE which determines the latitude and longitude of the call,
which is then passed back to the MPC, then it\'s passed in the second
database dip to the ALI database and sent to the PSAP.

So the whole \-- to complete a E911 wireless call you can see that
there\'s almost two major circles in the call path, and obviously when
you have circles in call paths it \-- most people would classify that as
not necessarily the most optimal way of sending traffic across.

Okay. So let me move on to the second part of what I was going talk
about, is what is the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council?
Well, as I said before, it\'s federal advisory committee. What makes
this one unique is it\'s composed of high level executives in the major
companies involved.  For example, the chairman of the current NRIC, NRIC
VI, is Dick Notebaert who is pretty well known guy at Qwest. Also on the
committee are Ivan Seidenberg, Ross Ireland, very important people in
the various communication carriers.

The original NRIC was chartered in 1992, and the reason why it was
chartered was because of some major signaling outages. I don\'t know if
you remember, but back in 1991, there was some signaling system seven
outages that took down all of Washington, D.C. Every phone call in
Washington D.C. was essentially stopped for six hours during the middle
of the day, and Congress wasn\'t too thrilled about it, and they
demanded that the FCC do something about it, so the FCC chartered the
Network Reliability Council to investigate these kinds of major network
problems. So it was originally chartered in 1992. It\'s been
subsequently rechartered five times, and the next one we are in the
process of chartering, so it will be the seventh version of it. That\'s
why we call it NRIC VII.

Now, the major output of NRIC is a set of best practices which we hope
the industries, and they generally do, adopt these best practices, and
these best practices are aimed at promoting reliability and improving
the reliability and interoperability of various telecommunications
networks.

Now there is a relationship between NRIC and emergency services. NRIC I,
or NRC \-- by the way, the first Network Reliability and
Interoperability Council didn\'t have the I in it, it was just the
Network Reliability Council, they added the interoperability when the
focus became more on interoperability in some of the later councils. The
first Network Reliability and Interoperability Council had a focus team
which concentrated on E911, and a number of the best practices that are
in place in the wire line industry actually came about through the
Network Reliability and Interoperability Council.

One of their recommendations was to have a paired ALI database. Another
one of their recommendations which is kind of a two-faced sword, was to
not migrate to SS7, and that may seem like an odd recommendation to stay
with an antiquated signaling system, but if you think about it, when the
network reliability council was first started, they started in the wake
of a couple of major SS7 outages, so they felt that they didn\'t want to
move emergency services E911 to something that was incredibly
unreliable, and that\'s what \-- that was the impression that everybody
had about SS& back in 1992. So that\'s why that recommendation came into
place, and I think we are the beneficiaries of that recommendation even
now, unfortunately.

NRC II also had a focus team that was aimed at E911, and the last
Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, NRIC VI, had a public
safety team, and most of its recommendations were aimed at public safety
announcements, making sure that there was emergency notification systems
and things of that type.

Well, what are some of the major goals that we have for NRIC VII with
respect to emergency services? Well, we want the near term E911 problems
identified and addressed. By the way, a number of these are being
currently addressed by ESIF and NINA and we\'re working together with
them to make sure that we don\'t have a huge amount of overlap. Let\'s
put it that way. In fact, many of the people that we\'ve been talking
about in trying to set up this charter have been members of ESIF and
NINA. We also want to insure that E911 and the emergency services meet
our needs five years from now. So let\'s focus.

This is something that\'s actually new for the Network Reliability
Council. We typically don\'t do this but we believe for emergency
services it\'s going to be extremely important to have a long-term
focus.

The third thing is, we really want to make sure we get input from all
the major stakeholders, and we want to make sure that all the
stakeholders help us develop both best practices and recommendations
that we can move forward with.

The focus areas that we are currently envisioning, and I\'m going to be
talking about each one of these in much more detail in a few seconds.
For emergency services we\'re going to \-- we\'re planning on having a
team that addresses near term E911 issues, one that addresses more
long-term E911 architecture issues, one that evaluates the best
practices that are currently in place, and there\'s - I think there\'s
36 of them that are related to emergency services. We\'re also going to
look at emergency services for things outside of E911. So, the
communication between like PSAPs and emergency service personnel.
There\'s going to be other focus areas for the Network Reliability and
Interoperability Council and we\'re not \-- we haven\'t completely
decided what they are going to be, but we believe there will probably be
a team addressing Homeland Security, probably one broadband access, and
maybe one on reliability.

As I said before, setting up NRIC, we certainly don\'t want to set it up
in a vacuum. We want to make sure that we use whatever teams are in
place and use the expertise of those groups as much as possible. One
group that we\'ve been interfacing with a lot is the Emergency Service
and Information Forum, ESIF, and I think Jim Nixon talked about it
yesterday, and there\'s been numerous representatives from ESIF giving
short presentations here.

Also, we have to interface with NENA and in fact, we\'ve been working
with Roger Hixon quite a bit actually on what NENA has been doing,
particularly in the long term. We plan on interfacing, of course, with
the public safety community, and one other person that we would like to
of course, interface with, is Dale Hatfield and we\'ve been on several
conference calls with Dale to make sure that NRIC actually will provide
the vision that he provided in his report. We actually may have that
come to fruition.

So some of the stakeholder groups, and we purposely put the first one on
top, the general public. Often, on a lot of these committees, and a lot
of these groups, you have carriers, you have PSAPs, but you don\'t
necessarily have anybody representing the interests of the general
public, and we\'re going to try to make sure we get various consumer
affairs groups, the disability community, and a few other groups,
involved to actually do have representation from the general public.

The communication carriers, of course, the wire line carriers, the
wireless carriers, but we\'re also going to try to get some ISPs
involved, because we believe that in the future, there\'s a very good
chance that voice-over IP or the ISPs are going to be the carrier of a
lot of the E911 traffic. We, of course, have to have PSAPs involved,
emergency services personnel, and of course, everybody\'s favorite,
government agencies, both at the federal, state and local level.

So let me start talking about some of the near-term, long-term and other
types of issues that we\'ve been wrestling with. The list, by the way,
is not complete, it\'s not in concrete right now. These are just some of
the things that we\'ve been wrestling with, and what we think that
currently NRIC ought to be looking at.

The first two items here are related to consistency. One of them has to
be with consistent timer thresholds, the other one is consistent format
for information passed from the PSAP during Phase One and Phase II. I
was just recently at a PSAP in northern Virginia, and the location
information, they were Phase Two compatible, and the location
information for or the address for a particular person, came up 445
Wilson Blvd. Well, what so happened was, the correct address was 1445
Wilson Blvd. Because of the format of how the information was
transmitted to them, the one was truncated and was put someplace else,
and you kind of sit there and say, my God, if that happens, the person
could be sent to an incredibly wrong location. So \-- and that\'s just
\-- that\'s actually kind of a minor problem, but the information format
is really quite varied in what\'s being sent to various PSAPs.

The third issue is it has to do with evaluating the concentration of
information in some of these databases. Some ALI databases are
incredibly huge. BellSouth has two ALI databases for their entire
region. They have millions, and millions, and millions of records. The
question is, should some of those kinds of databases, some of those
database accesses be a little bit more distributed than they even are
currently.

The next item has to do with test standards again for accuracy
requirements, and I don\'t think that issue is going to go away even
when ESIF provides their report. I think there\'s going to be continued
discussions on that issue, so that\'s why we\'ve included it here.

The final issue that I\'ve listed here is the information that is sent
to a caller when a network element fails. For example, let\'s assume the
E911 tandem fails, and there is no backup E911 tandem. In some parts of
the country, the customer actually gets a reorder, and if you think
about that, that person will never be able to complete that E911 call if
he dials E911, and to get a reorder or a fast busy seems to be a kind of
a scary message to send to a caller. Maybe he should be getting an
announcement or something different than a fast busy.

Some of the long-term issues, and some of these aren\'t surprises. One
of them is leveraging IP technology. Everybody wants to leverage IP, and
there\'s a good chance that if we leverage IP we might be able to get
different kinds of access technologies to work with E911 calls.

A second items has to do with overflow traffic from local PSAPs. We\'re
trying to figure out what to do with that. Is there a national solution
for something like this? Is it possible to have a national or regional
PSAPs to handle longer-term overflow traffic. There are some advantages
there might be to have a center for which PSAPs could send information
to, so for Homeland Security issues or for terrorist attacks or
whatever. So, this issue is really what should we do with overflow
traffic and whether some form of a national or regional PSAP might be an
applicable solution to that particular problem.

The next item has to do with recommending methods for doing signaling.
Should we bite the bullet and get rid of CAMA? So should we have some
sort of national standards or some sort of recommended standards for the
signaling to access various PSAPs?

The final item is related to the overall accessibility of different
types or ways of passing information to PSAPs. Shouldn\'t PSAPs be able
to accept voice-over IP calls? Shouldn\'t they be able to accept
pictures? Let\'s assume you\'re at an accident and you take a picture of
somebody or some thing, wouldn\'t that be wonderful information to be
able to pass to the emergency services personnel? At this point in time,
of course, that\'s pie in the sky thinking, but I think five years down
the road if we can\'t address that I think we\'re going to be in real
trouble.

There\'s two more committees, and I will be going through these very
quickly. There\'s one about evaluating existing best practices, so one
of the things that we\'re going to want to do is evaluate the
effectiveness of current best practices, look at some of the outages. We
currently collect outage information and what we would like to do is use
that to come up with ways to improve E911 networks. Finally, we\'re
going to try to tighten the language of some of the best practices.

One other area that I would like to mention is that the E911 really just
\-- I\'m sorry. Emergency services doesn\'t just stop with E911 and
getting information to the PSAP. If you can\'t get that appropriate
information from the PSAP to the emergency service personnel, it really
may not be that valuable, let\'s put it that way.

So one thing that we\'re looking is having some parallel kinds of
efforts in trying to improve the technology going from the PSAP also to
the emergency services personnel, and here\'s a number of the items that
we have listed, using IP technology, developing architectures. The third
bullet is to send text and pictures to emergency service personnel, and
the last item has to do with, you know, what is the role of E911 in
major disasters and terrorist attacks.

Okay. I\'m going to close with what are some of the NRIC milestones. The
milestones are first we plan on chartering the NRIC VII in January. We
hope to have the first official meeting in March of 2004. We have
quarterly meetings after that and then by December 5th, or December in
2005, we will have the final report of NRIC VII. Basically we hope that
NRIC will provide direction and support for emergency services. We
really hope that five years from now we\'re going to expect a lot from
E911. Hopefully it will meet the needs of the industries and the general
public. Thank you. I\'m sorry, do you have questions? Yes?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: (Unmiked) John (inaudible) from NENA, and I want
to tell you something, or reiterate something, and that is, I don\'t
think anyone is going to debate the need and the urgency or priority on
many of the items that you\'ve identified. There\'s an awful lot of work
in these areas that\'s already under way in a variety of different
forums, so it\'s going to be critically important, I think, that you get
the right people at the table, because what you won\'t want to do is
reinvent a lot of that stuff.

MR. HEALY: I couldn\'t agree with you more. Yes?

MR. HALL: I\'m Ed Hall, and I\'m with ATIS, and along with Jim, I\'m the
co-convenor, I represent ATIS on ESIF, and along the same lines that Jim
just expressed, how \-- I\'m very glad to see that ESIF is going to be
involved in this effort. If an issue is being worked, such as your
messaging to PSAPs is an issue that has already been brought into ESIF,
if that comes up as one of your short-term or near-term objectives, how
do we deal with it in the NRIC focus group if someone else is already
working it?

MR. HEALY: Well, obviously one of the things that we will try to do is
make sure that it\'s addressed in the most appropriate forum. Generally
what\'s happened with a lot of the ATIS groups is a lot of the same
people have been involved in both like ESIF and in like would be with
the network reliability council, for example, so there\'s a reasonably
good chance that the \-- by having \-- NRIC will be able to kind of
reinforce the solution that ESIF may come up with, may be able to
advertise it better, may be able to get more long-term support for it,
more high level support than ESIF might be able to get because, as you
know, the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council has very high
level executives. It\'s more of a high-level group as opposed to ESIF.
ESIF tends to be more of a nuts and bolts group, and I think working
together will actually make some of these things disappear. I honestly
don\'t think that\'s going to be a problem.

MR. HALL: Okay. Thank you. Just one follow-up on that, is it foreseeable
to believe that if an issue does come up and the best place to handle it
would be in ESIF or NENA technical committee, that it would be directed
\-- that work would be directed to ESIF or NENA?

MR. HALL: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hi. I know a resident died in Chicago high rise in
a fire due to smoke inhalation. It took the rescuers to get there about
90 minutes to locate the 911 callers. They were trapped in a staircase
and they looked \-- I guess the caller said that they are in a
staircase, but it was the wrong one, so it took about 90 minutes. Now,
what do we do about high rises and difficult areas, you know, open
areas, where none of the existing 911 location techniques are working? I
mean, do you do anything? Has anybody been giving any thought to that?

MR. HEALY: I don\'t \-- Gustavo might have an answer to that. At this
point in time, NRIC hasn\'t convened, so obviously NRIC hasn\'t done
anything on that particular issue. I do know that the \-- there\'s been
a \-- the issue of locating people in high rise buildings, and in
buildings that have PBXs and stuff is a long-term problems with E911 and
I know that there\'s lots of people working on that kind of an issue,
but at this point in time, maybe NRIC, maybe one of the NRIC committees,
ought to look at that issue. I\'m sorry. Did \-- she had a question?

MS. PARTIKA: Do you have time for one more question?

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Yes.

MS. PARTIKA: It\'s a quick one. I was \-- This is Janice Partika of
Technicom, and I was just wondering if there is a mechanism for bringing
issues to the attention of NRIC for consideration as one of your
initiatives and how one goes about that?

MR. HEALY: At this point in time call me. No, I\'m not kidding. At this
point in time \-- once it convenes there will be subcommittees and
sub-teams and stuff, and there will be appropriate contact person for
it. There\'s an NRIC Web site, NRIC.org, and once the charter comes out,
it will go there and there will be a capability of sending issues and
that kind of, you know, through the Web site, but at this point \--

MS. PARTIKA: Are these meetings public?

MR. HEALY: \-- in time, for NRIC VII, the best thing to do is probably
send it directly to a few of us in the FCC because we\'re just in the
process of chartering it.

MS. PARTIKA: Got you, and the meetings are public?

MR. HEALY: Yes.

MS. PARTIKA: Okay.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Okay. Thank you, John. I\'d like to hold that
question until the end so that we can stick to the schedule. Thank you.
Next we\'re going to be getting into an issue that is also I think,
going to be of interest to you, having to do with determining location
accuracy and speaking on that topic, and representing ESIF, is Gustavo
Pavon.

Gustavo has 15 years of experience as an independent wireless
telecommunications consultant. He currently represents TruePosition at
various standardization bodies. He has previously worked at Eriksson
where he was TDMA infrastructure marketing manager for Latin America,
and as I said, he\'s going to be giving us an update on the work in ESIF
\-- I have Study Group F, is that \--

MR. PAVON: It\'s G.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: It\'s G, okay. Sorry about that. Study group G,
which addresses testing methodology. Gustavo?

MR. PAVON: Thank you, Jeff. Let me get situated here. Today I\'m honored
to be here representing ESIF at the emergency services interconnect
forum, and in particular the Study Group G, which I happen to be the
leader for. As you probably know, ESIF is an eclectic collection of
public safety and wireless industry experts and I can really tell you
that as a subset of ESIF, Study Group G also counts in its ranks some of
the most qualified experts in their fields, so for me it\'s really an
honor to be accepted as their leader.

In this slide right now, what I did is I took from the last meeting that
we had, and I wrote the minutes, I recorded the participation. I\'m just
reflecting that participation here, and the purpose of me doing this is
to show the fact that it\'s really a joint effort. You can see we have
wireless carriers, we have public safety representatives, we have
location technology vendors, we have test vendors, et cetera, and I
really believe that all the segments are very well represented here.

Today I will be just giving a quick, report of where we are, what we\'ve
done, and where we\'re going. I can tell you that ESIF works with issues
being brought in front of it, usually through some of its members who
recognize there\'s a potential issue or something that needs be
discussed in a wide audience. So there was such an issue, we numbered it
number 22, the title of it is, Phase Two Test Methodologies, and
basically the issue identifies a lack of documented methodology for test
compliance to Phase Two requirements. All right? As a result, the issue
was accepted and it was recognized that this was in reality a problem
that needed to be discussed, so Group G was then created.

The first full Study Group G meeting happened on April 3, 2004,
coincidentally here in Washington, D.C. and we focused back then in
establishing the mission and scope for our study group, and I just
extracted from our documents our mission and scope here, and it reads,
to provide a set of minimum practical requirements that will insure
individual accuracy test methodologies, provide consistent valid,
verifiable, and reproducible results in a variety of environments based
on sound engineering and statistical practice and the two words that I
want to highlight here is, number one requirements, and we decided on
requirements because we recognize that throughout the industry there is
a number of methodologies already existing. We didn\'t want to impose a
specific set of methods on anyone, but we wanted to provide a benchmark
or a series of requirements that individual methodologies should really
be complying to in order to satisfy, you know, a certain generality for
the results.

The second word that I want to focus on is accuracy. We \-- as you can
see further below, we define the terms accuracy, functionality, and
maintenance phases for the tests that could be occurring in any 911
Phase Two deployment. We decided to focus on accuracy, accuracy being
basically the activity of generating location data, usually in large
volumes, depending on the variety of tests that you will be doing, and
in which the accuracy performance of the system will be gauged and this
will give everyone an opportunity to evaluate the system and realize if
there\'s any problems, where the problems are and give people an
opportunity to correct them.

We also defined functionality tests as a different phase that could be
done either together or separately, and functionality tests what it
really is is an end-to-end test, from the source of the location
information down to the recipient of that information behind the PSAP
screen, and there\'s a lot of things that can happen in between. As John
mentioned in his diagram, the system is quite complex, so an end-to-end
test, which is not what we\'re focusing on, an end-to-end test would
have to verify the integrity of that data, the timely deliver of that
data, the routine accuracy, the database integrity, all of those points
in between location source and location destination.

Finally, we also defined the term maintenance test, which will happen
perhaps on a periodic basis based on needs, depending on what goes on in
the carrier network, whether more cell towers are erected, frequency
plans are changed, et cetera, which is normal part of doing business for
some of our carriers.

All right. Let me tell you a little bit about the current status. Since
we were created, we\'ve met on a very aggressive schedule. As you can
see, we\'ve had a total of two face-to-face meetings, full meetings.
We\'ve had eight Web meetings, or cyber meetings, basically a conference
call with a common Web screen that everyone can look at. In addition, we
created teams that study group members volunteered for. These teams
would focus on specific sections of the document we were creating, and
these teams have been meeting individually or, you know, on their own,
not under Study Group G, but as a team, they\'ve been meeting on
conference call format on a number of occasions each of them.

The process that we\'re following for the creation of our requirements
document is, I like to make the analogy of putting together perhaps a
body, if one could do so. We start with the skeleton. What we did for
the skeleton we outlined the requirements what we thought the final
document could look like. We started writing some of the headlines. Then
we started working on the muscle that goes between those bones, that
skeleton. The individual sections are put together and put into the
document. Finally, when you have all the muscle \-- the skeleton, the
muscle, then you put the skin around it to make it look like a real
body, and that would be the final passes of the document, meaning make
sure that it\'s consistent from top to bottom, that there\'s nothing
left out, et cetera.

Right now we\'ve made some good progress in these last few months. We
actually created a baseline document based on the outline that we
previously created. The baseline, what it does, it\'s a receptacle or a
pretty solid version of the first of the sections that we\'ve already
discussed, we\'ve already moved around a little bit perhaps, that we\'ve
accepted as ready for baseline. So we put it into this collection of
sections and eventually when we\'re done putting sections together, this
will become our document.

As I said, we already have a few of the sections in there. Some of the
initial ones, like introduction, definitions, some general requirements
that bring the reader from the generality of the introduction as an
intermediate step before going into the hard details of the empiric and
predictive models that we\'re discussing.

We have a section with equipment requirements, what would be the minimum
someone should consider having as their arsenal of tools if you are
going to do some accuracy testing. We also have a definition for test
area. This baseline is currently available from ESIF. I believe it\'s on
the ESIF Web site. If one has to look for it. I\'m sure you will be able
to find it.

Now, talking about work in progress, this is really the heavy weight of
the document. We have a couple of sections that are being developed.
Number one, the section with empiric testing requirements, number two,
the section with predictive modeling, and I\'ll talk a little bit about
each of them.

Empiric methods in general consists of taking a number of test calls and
compare those tests calls, the location generated for each of those test
calls, with a ground truth reference, and determining the area.  This
has to be done in significant volumes so that the samples are
statistically significant. We will include requirements for not just
stationary tests such as one would do in a building for example, but
also dynamic tests.

We\'ve learned through experience that dynamic testing provides quite a
bit of volume of the necessary data to interpret what the system is
doing, but it\'s also economic and it has certain operational
advantages, provided of course, you have the proper equipment in your
van so that the equipment is generating its tests calls automatically
without human intervention. Then you cal do a large volume of test calls
with sufficient variety, sufficient random factor in terms of the speed
of the moving vehicle.

We also have, as part of that section, we will be giving some
requirements on the establishment of ground truth, what you need to do
to insure that your ground truth, your reference, is solid enough, that
you can rely on it, that you can compare your location data against.
Beyond that, we will also offer some examples of how to determine the
size of your samples, the number of test calls for a given test area, so
that you have a desired \--in particular, we\'re shooting for 90 percent
confidence in the statistical factors.

We\'re also working on predictive modeling, and let me tell you a little
bit about predictive modeling. Predictive modeling is there to really
augment the information which was developed through empirical methods.
It\'s also there to reduce reliance on resource-intensive field testing,
but it\'s not there to eliminate the need for empiric testing.
Predictive can fill some of the holes that perhaps some empiric testing
may have. Predictive can help you if you have an initial deployment of
E911 Phase Two compliant network or handset-based solution, if you do an
extension, perhaps one county or something that has a very similar
characteristic as the previously-deployed geographic area, perhaps you
can think about doing some predictive modeling there if you have
sufficient benchmark information, if your benchmark is reliable, and
provided, or course, you calibrated that benchmark and make sure that
it\'s calibrated against, for example, seasonal variations, diurnal,
night and day variations, things of that nature.

A predictive model, no one believes that can be applied in a vacuum. It
has to be applied with a certain degree of validation. You cannot just
go ahead and do a predictive modeling and decide, yes, this is what my
system is going to do. You have to validate that with empirical testing.
Perhaps the volume of test quotas is going to be a bit smaller because
you\'re only validating, you\'re not establishing the baseline, or the
benchmark. And certainly there will have to be requirements on
consistency of the predicted and empiric resource. So predictive
modeling is something that needs to be \-- if someone is going to use a
predictive model in determining the accuracy of deployment, then
there\'s a large set of prerequisites that these methodology must
fulfill, and we\'re trying to document what they are.

As far as our next steps, we\'ll have \-- we still haven\'t started
looking at it, but we\'ll have a section on analysis and summary of
results. We will, of course, have to review the whole document from top
to bottom, insure that the sections are editorially consistent, that we
haven\'t left anything out, that when we make a reference in section
eight to a previous section, that those references are consistent, et
cetera.

Finally, a target completion date I would look at March 31st. I know
I\'ve talked about November 15th previously, but in realities are
self-imposed deadlines, and what it means is that we\'re really moving
as fast as the resources that we have in ESIF Study Group G can allow.
This is people that have a multitude of responsibilities and among them
is helping us out in ESIF, so certainly we\'re a bit resource limited,
but we\'re nevertheless making some solid progress I believe.

Finally, let me tell you a little bit about the challenges that we\'ve
faced during our discussions, and certainly some that I anticipate we
will have in the future. The definition of test area, that was kind of a
difficult one because we \-- some of the members did not want to limit
the test area to match exactly a PSAP jurisdictional boundary. We wanted
to give the flexibility so that if, for example, in a given metropolitan
area, there is an E911 Phase Two compliant deployment under more than
just one, and typically there will be a number of PSAPs in that same
metropolitan area, that whole metropolitan area can be tested at one
time without having to do tests individually on a PSAP-by-PSAP basis. So
that determination took a little bit of dialogue, but eventually we got
there.

Accuracy or functionality. This, although we defined it at the very
initial meetings, these things are still coming back at us so I believe
the reason for it is that there\'s a real need for entwined validation,
and I believe there are actions being taken at ESIF and at NENA to make
sure that such validation takes place.

A little bit technical, but it took a little bit of dialogue as well, to
determine the location or the position of test points for accuracy. In
the end we decided that it should be any point in the location network,
just as long as the location measurement is exactly the same as what the
PSAP will in the end be looking at. If there are any intermediate notes
that, for whatever reason, transform that position data, then steps need
to be taken to insure that the final position is measured really.

Predictive methods, I know that this is going to be a challenging one
for sure, but I believe this is just because we haven\'t talked much
about it. Once we\'re on the same page within the study group, I believe
that the movement forward will be a little bit easier.

Finally, weighting. We have it as part of our outline, but we still
haven\'t got to it, and I know for a fact that this is going to be an
issue also that will take some dialogue before we can resolve it.

Finally, I want to thank you for your listening, but more than that, I
would like to encourage not just the members here of ESIF, but all those
that may be watching through the Web, and somehow hearing us, to \-- I
would like to encourage them to continue their participation. Only that
way we can complete the document that we have in front of us. That\'s
what I have, Jeff. Thank you. I would also like to open the floor for
any kind of questions, please. (Question handed up to the dais). Jeff,
do you want to read the question?

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Yes, I\'ll read it. Lauren\'s got very good
handwriting. Let me do it from up here. I\'m not sure if that mic works.

Is E911 working towards allowing two-way communication with text pages,
Internet voice override, PDA and other wireless text technologies?
Let\'s see. I think this is, are you aware of text technologies are
predominant in the deaf community?

MR. PAVON: I\'m not sure that the question is relevant to \--

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Yes, not to yours.

MR. PAVON: This is probably for a previous \--

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: John is that something you want to address as far
as what NRIC might cover?

MR. HEALY: Clearly, NRIC is going to be looking at voice-over IP and a
number of other text technologies. In fact, that\'s what I was referring
to when I indicated text on my view graph, so the answer is yes, they
certainly are going to look at other ways of accessing E911 through
these other technologies. One group that we are going to make sure that
we continue to dialogue with and make sure that we keep involved is the
different members of the disability community, including the deaf
community, so the answer is yes.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Okay. I think this one is related \-- let me
mention who this is from. It\'s from Brenda Kelly-Fry. She is a director
of MD Relay, and the question is, and by the way, I didn\'t mention this
in the beginning, but these are all questions that we\'ve gotten over
the Web. Since digital technology has not been perfected yet for use by
TTY users, and in parentheses she has, analog has more accurate
character rate, close parentheses, how can they benefit from the Phase
Two E911? How can they be located without digital cellular with GPS?
Sorry? Think that\'s a location item? Do you want to cover that,
Gustavo?

MR. PAVON: I\'ll certainly address it. There are new technologies
surfacing that will allow handicapped, deaf or otherwise-handicapped
people to use digital technologies. For example, GPRS and CDMA 2001XRTT
will allow that kind of interaction, and certainly those radio access
methods can be located with a high degree of accuracy.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Yeah, question from the floor?

MR. HALL: Actually, it\'s not a question. I might be able to help out on
that TTY question. Once again, I\'m Ed Hall from ATIS, and I\'m also the
chair of the industry TTY forum and I believe it was Brenda from TRS,
digital air interface technologies today are capable of supporting TTY
45 baud, baudot, and there are some issues in completing that 911 call
via a TTY device into a PSAP. There are some interconnection issues and
the TTY forum, with NENA, is continuing to find \-- we have a solution,
we\'re continuing to implement that solution. So, if Brenda has any
further questions, she can go up to the ATIS Web site and look up the
TTY forum, and contact me and I\'ll be more than happy to help her.
Thank you.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Thank you, Ed. The last question from the Web cast,
individuals will do in an emergency what they typically do in a
non-emergency. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people will use 711 as their
dial tone to make daily calls. Although relay outreach encourages people
to call 911 directly in an emergency, they will still do what they do
normally or what they normally do in a non-emergency situation. How can
relay receive a cellular call and still provide location, meaning XY
coordinates, and reach the most appropriate 911, 911 center rather, to
the site of the emergency? Anybody want to take that?

MR. FORSTER: Pat Forster at the Wireless Bureau. We have a pending
rule-making about requiring TRS centers to forward the location
information to a PSAP for TTY callers that dial 711, so that\'s being
addressed. I forget the document number.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Okay. I think there was a question from over here
for the earlier, for the first speaker, and I don\'t know if that
gentleman is still here or not.

MR. OENNING: Bob Oenning from the State of Washington, and I really
encourage you to also go back and look at the previous iterations of
outage

notification that were done in the different NRICs

starting with one, which wasn\'t actually NRIC, and follow that on with
some recommendations toward how carriers might notify PSAPs of outages
with a clear indication that by notifying the PSAPs in a cooperative
manner, then the citizens can be told what to do if that outage persists
over some time about 911. It\'s a piece we have never addressed, and we
should have a long time ago. It also takes some weight off the carrier
in that if that piece of it is taken care of as far as the citizen
notified and they have another way to handle the emergency, it is just
better for all of their subscribers.

MR. HEALY: We will take that under \-- that\'s actually a very good
idea.

MODERATOR GOLDTHORP: Okay. I think I\'ll close the session with that. I
want to thank you all for your attention, for your questions, and I\'d
like to introduce, turn the podium over to Commissioner Kathleen
Abernathy, who will be moderating our next session this afternoon.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Okay, folks. Stay with us a little bit longer.
We\'re in the home stretch. Welcome to the last panel of the second
meeting of the Commission\'s E911 Coordination Initiative, and I\'ve \--
from talking to others, I know that it\'s proven to be very helpful and
effective presentations, and I\'m pleased that so many folks have been
willing to come in and participate and help us as we tackle these very
difficult and important issued associated with E911 implementation. Your
input is, as you know, critical to the success of the program.

This afternoon\'s panel promises to take the discussions a step further,
which is into the future. Where do we want to be in the future? What
that has to do with is, we know what E911 can do today. Where do we
think it can go tomorrow? We can\'t rest just on the initial
implementation. We have to refine the service. It has to be a vibrant
service that can adapt as necessary to new technologies, new uses. So
that means that our rules have to be flexible, and they have to allow
the providers to delivery emergency services that are flexible and are
operable, effective, and efficient, and recognize new technologies and
new applications, and to that end, we\'re hoping that today\'s panel
will help enlighten us on many of those questions.

We have two panels here at the end. We\'re going to start the first with
two speakers. The first two speakers are going to focus on where do we
think we\'ll be ten years from now. How do we think these services, what
do we think they will look like, how do we think consumers will be using
them, and then that will follow up with a discussion of developing
technologies and commercial applications that will help us achieve the
vision that these folks are going to talk about.

So first I\'d like to introduce our speaker Mr. David Jones, the
Director for Emergency Services, with Spartanburg, South Carolina. He\'s
going to focus on NENA\'s future path, and where they plan to go, and
he\'ll talk for about \-- I\'ve forgotten how long they\'re giving you.
I think eight minutes. We\'re going to do some Q&A right after, then
we\'ll move to our second speaker, and then we\'ll bring another group
up.

MR. JONES: Well, it\'s obvious that they saved all the cool stuff for
the last, so that\'s the reason why we\'re here today, and also, I have
to differ with the Commissioner. I was under the impression, because
we\'re last, that we had no time constraints. So, excuse me, I need to
tee up my 45 slide presentation. I\'m kidding.

Actually, what I\'m going to talk about is the NENA path plan, and I
think it\'s appropriate that this discussions begins from here because
as a path plan it is simply a tool for guidance. I like to use the
analogy of a path through the woods that will get you to where you need
to go. Well, the Future Path Plan of NENA is a tool designed to insure
guidance or to provide guidance to technologies, both today and into the
future, to insure that the 911 networks are addressed in the appropriate
manner.

The basic objective of the NENA Future Path Plan is as I quote, \"Any
911 call originator, voice or text\", which goes back to that question a
few minutes ago, \"must be able to access the nation\'s 911 systems and
have this call delivered to the appropriate PSAP with caller location
identification. Further, that PSAP must be able to receive, process, and
manage the data for appropriate emergency service response\". That\'s
the basic premise and objective of the NENA Future Path Plan.

Now, the building blocks for that objective is that we maintain or
improve reliability and service characteristics and that we talk about
the age of the 911 network, that it is proven, that it is reliable, and
it is very dependable. That has long been a building block of that, and
now we are seeking to maintain that, or improve it, with future
technology.

A second building block is to move the 911 system design toward the use
of forward-looking mainstream technologies and open interfaces requiring
fewer custom solutions. Plain and simple.

The third building block of the path plan is it must be driven by
service needs, functions and features, identified with the perspective
of public safety and its operations.

So what criteria do we use to establish this path plan? What do we guide
against? Again, as I said, it must be reliable, it must be dependable.
Basic tenet. Then we move into the service parity. We must have service
parity for all 911 callers, and by that we really mean by potential 911
callers, for whatever reason. We need \-- we are going to look at,
again, this criteria is for least complicated design. A better way to
describe that is maximum call and data delivery with the least cost.
That\'s a criteria, and then finally, a criteria that will be compared
against, is a documented process, or processes, to insure adequate
deployment and implementation and then, of course, ongoing support.

So what these criteria takes then, of course, is the successes of the
current 911 networks, and applying them and advancing them for use in
the future against keeping the same type of emphasis on reliability and
dependability, but then leveraging that toward the future technologies.

To insure or to assist in this compliance, NENA is in the process of
developing a compliance too, the path plan compliance tool. It will
become a NENA standard. It will be applied towards all future
technologies that we\'re going to hear about in just the next few
minutes. But essentially what it does, is it compares these proposed
solutions to the subjective in this criteria that I\'ve just outlined.
That is the compliance tool that will be used to insure that the path
plan and the 911 networks are achieved.

There are some ongoing activities with NENA that support the goals of
the Future Path Plan and its objectives and criteria. I\'m going to name
a few. The XML standards of data handling. That work is ongoing. The
previous IP workgroups have all been consolidated under voice-over IP,
packet, technical, and operational committee structures. NENA\'s network
access group is evaluating national technical options for common access
and call transfer. Of course, the ongoing works of telematics interface
options continues, again being applied with this criteria in mind. The
NENA SWAT initiative is supporting and is furthering the issue of the
Future Path Plan. And then as we just heard a few minutes ago from the
\-- regarding the NRIC initiative, is NENA continues to apply these
goals and concepts in working with the FCC as we contemplate future 911
design.

I\'m going to wrap this up by saying, summarizing, why we \-- why this
is important for us, for all of us. This is a way to insure that the
effectiveness and integrity of 911 systems is continued and advanced. We
accomplish that by using a traditional NENA method, and that is by
building partnerships with all of the players in this industry, both the
way you\'re accustomed to now, public safety, LECs, wireless carriers,
other providers, but will soon be moving into a whole new world of
involved parties in 911 networks, and it is building upon that
partnership, continuing what we have, forging new ones, and insuring the
integrity of our networks as they relate to 911. Thank you. I\'ll be
happy to answer any questions that there may be, or do you wish to \--

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Why don\'t we take them all \--

MR. JONES: That\'s fine.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: I\'ll now turn it over to Dr. Jack Potter from
ComCARE Alliance, who has a vision of how he thinks all of these various
users will work together on a single database, and we\'ll let him make
his presentation, and then we\'ll take questions for both Mr. Jones and
Dr. Potter.

DR. POTTER: Thank you. Well, first of all, I\'d like to thank
Commissioner Abernathy for having the ComCARE Alliance project presented
here today. As has been said, I believe that we are here to present a
vision of where we think the communications involving 911 traffic can
better integrate into the continuum of public safety. We all respect the
911 system for the success of the system, but I see it really as a
continuum in what I then do later on in a system.

The ComCARE Alliance is an organization that\'s been working on a future
vision for at least the three years that I\'ve bee involved in the
project. Being here at this meeting it seems like old home week for the
ComCARE Alliance. There are a number of folks here that have been very
important in developing this vision and helping to bring it into a
demonstration model in Virginia. I won\'t go into all the different
folks that are here, but let me just summarize by saying over 90
organizations are members of the ComCARE Alliance, have been working on
this vision, have been inputting both as users of the system, as vendors
developing product, and as folks willing to test the system.

A lot of people may wonder what an emergency room doctor is doing here
then at an FCC conference on 911, and it really boils down to the
information coming in through 911 affects me very directly, and as we
grow the information stream that will be introduced in the system
through communications channels, it becomes all the more important for
the historically one or two steps removed providers to move to the
forefront and take advantage of this information early on.

Interoperability is frankly a term that\'s been thrown around very
loosely for a number of years now. Certainly since September of \`91.
Interoperability is something we\'ve known we\'ve had a problem with for
decades in public safety, and it has gotten a lot of attention and we
appreciate the attention. We want to make sure that people understand
that interoperability is not just communication within first responders
immediately on a scene. Interoperability really involves all the players
along the chain that can advance their care and their communication and
their assistance to an incident earlier in the game, so with that I\'m
going to turn to our presentation.

The ComCARE Alliance has developed a vision we refer to as the E-Safety
network, and the E-Safety network really underscores the fact that this
is a lateralizing platform where we can bring any number of agencies
with responsibility and public safety to the forefront, to put people in
a position early on to get information that will be coming available in
the very near future to make decisions real time.

As this was introduced, it was introduced as a technology for the next
ten years, and I would put to you that these are technologies really
that we need to be thinking about in the next two years, and in fact,
pieces of which are available today. So looking at communications in
respect to public safety, I would put to you that we really need to look
at the best communications technologies for public safety. Right now the
business community in our country, certainly the military, have advanced
technologies. They move information extremely reliably, extremely
securely, much faster than we are. If I go to Spain and put my ATM card
into a machine there, I can get \$100 if I\'ve got \$100 in my account
back home, and they know that. When I put my machine in it takes a
matter of seconds and that transaction occurs. A lot of things happened
when I did that.

Those sorts of things should be able to happen when someone calls 911.
We don\'t have that technology available to most of the country right
now. It\'s got to be fast and smart. Interoperability really should be a
buzz word that connects non-traditional allies and agencies, and I was
very pleased to hear David say that. Everything that he said I would
echo in terms of the vision of where 911 needs to be.

In any case, safety I would put to you, really is not one agency
communicating in serial fashion with another agency downline. Think of
public safety as an enterprise, much the way we look at GM with all its
component pieces where they today can interoperate very effectively,
communicating all their needs for inventory, et cetera. That doesn\'t
happen in public safety. We need to think of public safety as an
enterprise, and as an enterprise I think we\'ll bring all the relevant
agencies together very quickly, and I think that the savings there in
terms of lives would be immediate.

In fact, what occurs traditionally today is that we are approaching our
current problems with all the funding currently available, as one off
solutions, as silos. Everyone has a great idea, and all of them very
valid, the ones I\'ve seen, but often times they solve that agency\'s
problem, and provide the interoperability and communication across
platforms to include non-traditional partners that they may not even now
exist.

So when it comes to Homeland Security, the whole scope of this question
has grown exponentially, and right now what were traditional boundaries
for jurisdictions and responsibilities have blurred. They\'ve expanded
exponentially and it expanded in ways that we didn\'t expect just a few
years ago.

Right now we need to be able to absorb information from well outside
traditional sources, and there are a number of information sources
available today, and in the very near future, where we could leverage
that information for very rapid decision-making and again, improve the
response we offer to citizens in both small and large incidents.

Syndromic surveillance is a concept that a lot of folks have heard
about, that basically tracks what\'s going on in an area and can deliver
information that piecemeal is meaningless, but in the aggregate, paints
a very clear picture, and if we had that sort of clear picture on
regional levels, we could make very effective decisions not three weeks
later when it all becomes clear, but close to real time as these things
are evolving. This amounts to a need to collect data real time. So
again, the idea that safety and all its relevant agencies, make up an
enterprise solution I think is very critical.

E911 was clearly the first effort in what was our emergency response
network to include data, location data, something that was coming in
with the voice message. What we find is now that a number of different
information streams, digital information, information vital to make
decisions, will be coming in in the very near future. We need to have
methodologies for taking that information, packeted information, and
moving it whether it be voice, video, or typical data from a
spreadsheet.

Right now 54 percent of the population is not covered by a PSAP that has
submitted a letter for Phase Two. I think that\'s a very incriminating
statistic. We need to make it easier for PSAPs to move through Phase
Two, and it may well be that the traditional methodologies we\'re
imposing on them, bring in a vendor, get another one off solution that
fixes your problem, may not be the most cost-effective methodology and
it may not standardize the process any better than we currently have it.

What brought me into this adventure several years ago was the promise
that one day, when a car crashed in my jurisdiction, I would know 30
seconds after that crash, where it happened, what was involved in the
accident, and the potential for injury to the participants in that
vehicle. That is right around the corner today, and right now in most of
America, there is no way to seamlessly transfer that data to the people
that need to know, and I\'ll put it to you that in a lot of regions, the
folks that collect this data aren\'t even sure they know the right
people to call. They desperately want that information, and I think we
can use that information to save lives.

If you look at this graph, seismic information, this is from a sensor in
a car. This is a real crash, and by using celorometers in the car and
sensors, we can actually collect this data today, and using that data,
recreate a crash test dummy type picture of what happened in the car and
predict injury to the folks that were participants in that car. A car
computer right now knows a lot of things that would help us. It knows if
you have your seatbelt on, it knows how fast you\'re going, it knows how
many people are sitting in the car. That can be really helpful if you
happen to run into something at 85 miles an hour. People could prepare
for your care and the seamless integration of services responding to
that could be very effective.

Likewise, hazardous materials are traveling up and down our highways in
ways that we have no idea. People are tracking this very effectively.
It\'s a very important thing to know. But in fact, if one of these
trucks crashes, people know, folks in my business don\'t know. We need
that information to make effective decisions and it\'s available today
if we have the network to move the information.

So what do we need? And I think this is a term from the CommCare folks,
but it\'s Wal-Mart and Visa meet emergency medicine, or emergency
situations, and what it is is trying to translate what is available
technology today for responding to information management, and applying
it to our world, and a few of these terms have been brought up, and
obviously, the people in the audience are much more sophisticated than I
in understanding what this really means, but the idea of common data
standards, XML as a wrapper, getting all the different data feeds into
the same system and parsing it on a need-to-know basis, is a very
powerful concept.

Web services are very well understood. GIS mapping is critical. And the
term open standards, we\'re not looking forward to a vendor-controlled
market where one or two control the market. There are a tremendous
number of applications being developed all of which have very specific
and important applications, but I think we need to be open to all of
them, and so discouraging the one off and the silo concept in developing
these enterprise solutions, and lowering costs by distributing these
technologies on a common platform, everybody using the same basic
framework, you drop the cost for everyone, and they\'re allowed to pick
their own needs and solve their own problems on a common platform.

In any case, high speed data access has got to be a priority for public
safety, and I think that\'s certainly where the FCC can take a role in
trying to mandate the importance of broadband communication for public
safety. That is not commonplace in most of the dispatch agencies in my
jurisdiction, and I\'ll put to you probably not in much of the country.

A very important concept as we have piloted our project is that you
cannot have one system that solves this problem, biohazards, and this
system that solves traffic incidents, and this system that solves some
other important thing that you\'re doing. If we can make the same
platform that deals with day-to-day problems the platform you turn to
when it\'s a very important large-scale event where people remember how
to use it, it\'s there in front of them, it\'s something that they have
comfort with and it will be more effective. And then of course, the
standardized interfaces for data sets so that we can move this fairly
seamlessly.

What we have done, and I\'m going to talk very briefly about this now,
because we have set up a demonstration across the hall. There is a
working prototype using technologies available today, that we have
actually demonstrated several times now in the state of Virginia, just
across the river, interoperability, allowing end-users to select the
data they want to see, several levels of communication available in the
same system, and it\'s based on a simple framework of the need for a
directory, and electronic directory that doesn\'t exist today, but
could. The framework for this directory has been built, and it\'s built
upon a framework of a GIS map where you as an agency provider, could
define an area in a map that you\'re responsible for, and that\'s
depicted in this slide here.

Some interface. This was a very simple cheap Web site put together for a
demonstration very quickly. It doesn\'t cost a lot of money, there are
very sophisticated versions of this. This could be available widely and
provide access to messaging in a very expensive format. But what it
provides for is an end-user to set up links that they can find helpful,
an interface to emergency messaging, and a map on which to deploy these
incidents as their battlefield.

The notion that a lot of good work has been done in this country
preparing for a number of different kinds of incidents, there\'s lot of
great training available, a lot of it online. Any training that\'s been
done in any given institution can be put online, on your own Web site,
linking that real time training for just in time application can be
extremely valuable when we\'re anticipating any number of different
events we may never have seen before. That can be available today.

So again, in summary, it\'s this notion that we want the best
communication, we want fast communication, and we want to put our
commanders \-- the reason we\'ve been very successful in recent military
engagements, we have put commanders in charge of information that\'s
going immediately to the real time folks on the front lines, and back
and forth the information flows, and that keeps them in touch with
what\'s really happening.

I\'d like to think that emergency providers that are in command centers
have that same access to information immediately going right to the
front line people. So with that I\'m going to close. It was \-- again, I
would like to emphasize to folks there is a working model that
prototypes this. It\'s available for demonstration across the hall, and
we\'d love to have people come by. Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Thank you very much, and as you know, we\'re
happy to take questions from the audience, but I think I\'ll start with
a quick one for Mr. Jones. As we\'re looking towards the future, and the
FCC is going to try and be cognizant about what we\'ve done wrong, what
we\'ve done right, how is this? We have a rule called the deliver all
calls rule, and this was originally adopted to promote 911 connectivity
for end users which, of course, is what everybody wants. What we didn\'t
anticipate there was an unintended consequence, and we tend to find that
happens in our world a lot, and that is, and for call centers
specifically, and that\'s where you have these non-initialized phones
and unintended calls, and so a bunch of these calls will go into the
call center and sort of bog down the calling, and we\'ve heard
complaints that we should \-- that somehow maybe we should be thinking
differently about how calls go through.

Now maybe this is something where you work through some network that
tracks and makes sure these are real calls and does it so fast that you
don\'t bog down the PSAP with the information, but these are some of the
questions that we\'re going to be grappling with as we go forward about
what sort of obligation should we put on providers?

MR. JONES: I think that\'s an excellent question, and I\'m going to go
back to a statement I made in my discussion, talking about the basic
building block or a concept of the NENA Future Path Plan, and that was
that whatever solutions we\'re referring to must be driven by the
service needs, functions and features that are identified with the
perspective of public safety operations. So in other words, we look at
this, what rule-making, or what solution are we referring to, what
impact is it going to have from an operations of the public safety and
the emergency service provisioning out in the field. It is \-- some
could make the argument that this particular rule that you refer to the
perspective of public safety was not brought to bear and now we are
paying that price. That is why this path plan identifies that from the
beginning. We\'re going to compare these solutions and technologies to
that to insure that the perspective of public safety and its operations
are adhered to.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: And I have one for Dr. Potter. One of the
questions that I have is how do you envision the management of this
information flow, and by that I mean, some of it will have privacy
concerns associated with it. You can have so much information that you
have no information if it\'s not properly categorized, and you\'re still
at a loss, and how do you manage the flow to the appropriate parties?
What\'s your vision for that, and then what, if any, role should
government have in this, or is this more or less a program where once we
place the obligations on carriers to be sure and convey this
information, we can allow the marketplace then to handle the delivery
methods.

DR. POTTER: Those are excellent questions. I think it\'s really a
combination of all of the above. It\'s a simple answer. No. It\'s the
classic public-private partnership. It truly is going to require that
municipalities or the federal government or state government come
forward and to fund parts of this which would require, I believe, the
upgrade of infrastructure in your PSAPs, if not your hospital networks.
It would require the development of this directory. The directory itself
is a concept that\'s extremely important, and I think it answers the
next question that you raised.

The directory is a self-registered pathway so that you as a provider
would actually delineate the kinds of information that you want. It
wouldn\'t be as much a push as a pull, so that you wouldn\'t necessarily
be inundated with information that you don\'t want, and there are
filters that can be placed on that information to very effectively
control how you visualize it. There are a number of application Web
sites which have additional tools that segregate the information, and
make it very easy to manage, and I think those are important to see, and
we can demonstrate those for folks next door.

But I think that the way we see this, that there are certain information
streams that currently are not available that folks will find helpful.
One of those is the advanced crash notification and there are privacy
issues with that. I don\'t think we can mandate on society that
everybody have this in their car, and put this forward. We did it with
seatbelts, we\'ve done it with other things, but at this point I would
take the percentage of folks that would voluntarily submit the
information.

Right now I don\'t get it at all, and if 50 percent, 70 percent of the
folks that had this technology in their cars turned it on voluntarily,
that\'s information we don\'t currently have, and I\'d like to enable
them to offer that information. So I think we have to be very careful
what we mandate, but to say it\'s available is a different story. But
once the framework is up for this system, the applications would be left
to vendor groups that would contract with either with state level or
lower level, local level agencies and I think to open that marketplace
to the best vendor is the American way.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: I was just curious, David, if you have any
thoughts about this relationship between the public safety answering
points, which are clearly government-funded responsible to the public
and how it might work with the kind of vision that Dr. Potter has been
talking about.

MR. JONES: It was very interesting to note the commonalities in these
two discussions before you. The path plan and its desire for continuing
or forging new partnerships is built upon those basic precepts of
insuring both the reliability and integrity of 911 networks however they
may be applied. This is one example which at least at this brief
discussion point, simply proves that point.

DR. POTTER: I\'d like to add one other thing. There is no one set of
rules that will govern the way this information is managed. I think that
it has to be the local level, because what happens in Chicago may be
entirely different than what happens in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
They\'re different communities with different standards for
information-sharing and those have to be respected, and to have the
locality maintain control of how that information was shared, is very,
very important.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Now are you working today with any partners on
\-- not as extensive as your vision is, but today with some of the sort
of the crash data-gathering?

DR. POTTER: Well, currently the crash data officially is not available
in terms of real stuff coming out of the cars. We have had up a
communication platform which linked fire and rescue, local police, the
hospitals, and we opened it up to public health in a recent drill. So
we\'re already linking multiple agencies.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Are there any questions from the audience before
we go on to our next panel? If not, I want to thank both these gentlemen
for coming today and spending time with us and talk about the future.
Thank you.

Okay. Panel two. This is where we move on to focus on developing
technologies and commercial applications to achieve this vision of where
we\'re able in a very real time way to manage the data, manage the
information, in a way that advances public safety and safety of life.

What I thought I would do just to save time in getting up and down, is
we\'ll start to my far left with Jeff Robertson of CML Emergency
Services, and I think what I\'d like for each of you to do is do a brief
intro who you\'re with, talk about what you\'re working on, and then
just move to the next person. That way, I don\'t need to continually get
up and down. I can listen and then at the end we\'ll have questions for
everyone when we finish, and you guys can \-- and, in fact, each of you
can comment on the information that\'s been provided by the others.
Let\'s start.

MR. ROBERTSON: Great. Well, thank you, Commissioner Abernathy. It\'s a
pleasure to be here. My name is Jeff Robertson. I\'m the president and
CEO of a company called CML Emergency Services. We\'ve been in public
safety at our company since 1979. You can probably tell that I wasn\'t
the president back then, but we are pretty proud of our history in
public safety of over a decade. We have over 960 PSAPs across the United
States that are customers of ours, and we have roughly 235 employees
dedicated to public safety, and for the discussion today, I really want
to just turn it back to when I call my bank, Bank of America, and I dial
the 1-800 number, I am amazed before they pick up the phone, they\'ve
got my bank balance, they\'ve got \-- they know the fact I didn\'t make
my minimum payment on my Bank of America Visa, they also have my credit
bureau, they know my retirement savings, how much is left on my mortgage
payment, and that\'s before the phone rings, and I\'m amazed that when I
call the bank, and I say where are you, oh, I\'m in California, or I
say, well, where are you, oh, I\'m in Virginia when they take my call,
and I think \-- I wanted to know is equipment today, and the people
watching is, why isn\'t this in public safety today?

I\'ve been in technology most of my young career and is it because of
the technology? I don\'t think so because of the example I just
mentioned to you. Is it because Bank of America is a for-profit
business? Is it lack of funding?

I\'d like to say on this funding point we heard a lot over the last
couple of days on funding, and I\'ve had the pleasure when visiting our
customers across the country, on the west and east coasts, and I\'ve
traveled to almost every other 50 states, and I took a good \-- I would
urge each PSAP director, especially at the state level, to take a good,
hard look at the funding mechanism. I have not yet \-- I\'ve been to
maybe one state jurisdiction where the funding for running the 911
network wasn\'t really there. If you look hard enough, we think it\'s
there.

We have a team of telecom engineers, lawyers, business people,
accountants, who will be happy come to the jurisdiction and do a summary
for you of where those costs are, and where we think we can help you. If
you\'re under budget constraints, I think the money is in the system. It
really is in the system. You have to look a little bit, but there is
money there, funding for these kind of technologies.

One of the things that we said we\'d like to prove to you as well when
we show up is that you can gain control of your network, and the public
safety network, when you gain control of it, it will not add any more
cost to your already burdened budgets, and I think we saw this with, and
actually with the visionary of one of our customers, Greg Ballentine,
the president-elect of APCO out of Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri, the
Mid-America Regional Council, he took control of his network in 2002,
and since then he put out a white paper, out with the Mid-America
Regional Council, and he was saving \$2 million a year by taking control
of his network.

Now he didn\'t \-- that money was used and given back to the citizens in
forward mapping technologies, training of the PSAP staff and other
things, so they put it to good use, and by the way, when he took
control, he went Phase Two ready at the same time.

At CML we believe that the technology I just shared with you about Bank
of America should be available to public safety, and that\'s our mission
at my company, and I can tell you out of the 235 employees that are at
our company, we are dedicated to deliver that to public safety. All our
R&D efforts are focused in this area.

I want to just talk about what we call four step plan, and we think that
this plan is doable, it\'s being done today. In step one, it\'s a direct
connection to the carrier. So in the district here, in mid-November, we
had the pleasure of having the District of Columbia as a customer of
ours, in mid-November the District of Columbia takes control of their
network. They are connecting directly, just like Greg Ballentine did in
Kansas and Missouri. We\'ve seen Pete DeNutte who was here from New
Hampshire took control of his net work. We saw Ray LaBelle from the
State of Rhode Island who was one of the first PSAPs to take Phase Two
calls, took control of his network. We\'ve done it in Hawaii,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in Allegheny County, Okaloosa County, Florida,
and now \-- and we all know Norm Forshee from Saint Claire County,
Illinois, as well. We\'re pretty proud that he\'s a CML customer and we
got him to Phase Two in 2001 by taking control of his network, and he
connected directly to the carrier.

Step two, now that you have control of your network, we like to tell
public safety officials, now you bring in IP. You heard a lot of talk
earlier from the two gentlemen about voice-over IP technology and IP,
and I\'ve been in data technology all my career. Once you do that you
can start sharing information, whether it\'s hospitals, or it\'s On-Star
sending crash notification from the vans. I mean, now once you\'ve got
\-- but you\'ve got to get control first. You\'ve got to get that
control first, then you can have these \-- all these open standards of
IP information come to your PSAP or to your entire state for that
matter.

Also I think step two, once you start adding these IP technologies,
you\'re going to see one other thing happen. We can now take care of
call congestion. When 50 callers call at the same time to report a small
fender-bender on I-95, you can deal with those calls. We can tell the
location where they\'re calling from, and chances are if they\'re all in
the same 100-yard radius, it\'s probably the same incident. If somebody
calls from the other end of town, chances are it\'s a different
incident, could be someone having a very serious, you know, heart attack
or something. We can get that call through rather than giving it a fast
busy and jamming up the phone lines, because most agencies do not have
enough lines to handle the wireless 50 callers simultaneously.

Step three, we enable anyone in your publics that your secure, private
safety network, whether that be in your state, large metropolitan area,
to log-in. When you\'re having an emergency IP enables you know to log
in. Call the guys at the fire station that have been previously trained,
start taking 911 calls, and then when you\'re done, the emergency is
over, log off. 80 percent of the PSAPs in the country are four seats or
under as far as operators, and they\'re rarely staffed 100 percent.
That\'s 80 percent. So having that ability to turn people on when
there\'s an emergency, we feel the technology will really be there.

Imagine adding with this IP technology, you can add 50 phone lines in a
matter of seconds, so you can do that by going in and setting it up, 50
seconds and you have 50 more phone lines without ever calling the phone
company. When the emergency is over, the tornado is done, shut them
down, so you don\'t have to pay for them, but use with a bandwidth
overflow.  This is being done in private business today with voice-over
IP, and we\'re delivering it to customers today. Companies across the
country are doing it.

The fourth step and the last step we see in the plan is you have a
public safety network, a network operations center. The governor could
watch \-- I\'ll wrap up. I\'m pretty passionate about this. The governor
could wrap up \-- or the governor could look at a screen and see all the
PSAPs in his state, could see there\'s three break and enters happening
in the north part of the state, there\'s a big accident on the highway
in the middle of the state, and on the bottom of the state he could see
there\'s a highway \-- a high-speed police chase going on. You can watch
all that once all these PSAPs are connected.

So I\'d like to thank you. Dale Hatfield had a great report. I will not
quote him, but he had a great thing in his report and he had three
lines. He said, E911 calls \-- he was concerned about the increased
volume of E911 calls are being built upon a platform or a foundation
that has serious limitations in terms of speed, scalability, and
adaptability, and he was also concerned in his report about voice-over
IP and other things. I think by taking control of the network, following
a four-step plan, I think we can get you there, and I know CML would
love to help you. Thank you very much, Commissioner.

MR. ALLRED: My name is Craig Allred. I know on the program it says Drew
Dawson. He was going to fill in for me, but I was able to make it here
and I appreciate it. I retired from the State of Utah from the
Department of Public Safety after 24 years, and so I do have a little
bit of a background in emergency services. I am now the public safety
coordinator for the Intelligent Transportation Office of the U.S.
Department of Transportation and I know when you\'re on the roadway
intelligent transportation is an oxymoron, but there really is such a
thing and it does help, and I\'d like to go over a couple of the things
that I believe are useful and are going to help you as you become more
aware of it.

The goal of our program is to build a bridge between the transportation
and public safety communities, and many times that is a challenge to say
the least, but I think when we look at it, you have to realize that we
cannot continue to build highways. We can\'t continue to add more lanes,
and more lanes, and more lanes. We have to be more effective on where
we\'re at.

The reason the Department of Transportation is so interested, and has
been interested as the joint program office in wireless E911 for the
last two-and-a-half years, is just that. We are concerned about safety,
mobility, and how do we clear and keep those roadways running? How do we
get the proper EMS help to the emergency physicians? How do we keep the
system running, and how do we keep it running?

If you look at an incident that may happen on one of the bridges in New
York City within two hours can affect the traffic in the D.C. area.
Within an hour it can start affecting Boston, Philadelphia. Within just
a very few hours, you can have backups all the way down to North and
South Carolina. Secondary crashes, crashes that are happening because of
the primary incident, often are much more devastating than the primary
crashes.

We need to be looking at the new technologies. I appreciated the
speakers that came before talking about some of the efforts the last two
days. We\'re looking at, for example, New York City right now, an
integrated incident management system where not only do we have
information, wireless information going back and forth, but we\'re also
sending photographs to be able to allow the primary and secondary
responders to respond quicker, to be able to clear the scene much
quicker, and get the proper medical help, GIS equipment, GPS, been using
it and up and running right now in New York City, and is between the
fire department, law enforcement, public works, and department of
transportation.

We have a project between the Department of Justice and the Department
of Transportation and in that project, what we are doing, is we are
looking at the CAD integration, the computer assisted dispatch centers,
to make sure we\'re transferring the proper information to all the
parties that have a proper need.

We\'re working very closely with the telematic service providers,
including On-Star, ATX.

we have a project with On-Star to be able to transfer the data and be
able to get some of their information into the native 911 system. Right
now there is a big problem just with the data. There\'s great data out
there, but the On-Star centers are actually having to call a ten-digit
number. We need to be able to do that better, and On-Star has been
working extremely close with us, and we appreciate those efforts, as are
the other telematic service providers. Telemedicine, you already heard
Dr. Potter talk about some of the things that are going on there. I\'m
fully in agreement with how can we give the best resources, how can we
get those responses out there the proper way?

Now I told you I came from the state of Utah. I can remember many times
being called at two o\'clock in the morning, woke up, get in a patrol
car, and drive 75 miles one way to get to a crash scene, not knowing
what I was going to see when I got there, whether I\'d have one, two,
three, six, eight, ten people in that vehicle, how violent the crash
was, what type of response? Getting there after an hour or an
hour-and-a-half and then having to request another ambulance, or another
crew.

Technologies of this nature, and what you\'re seeing in the Shenandoah
Valley, are vital to law enforcement, public safety, and emergency
medical services. The Amber Alert. I just came back from an Amber Alert
meeting this afternoon. Amber Alert is a way of building that electronic
bridge between public safety and transportation again that can be used
for weather incidents, natural disasters, terroristic incidents, those
types of things there.

We have to remember that safety and mobility is what the goal we have in
the joint program office, and how can we use technology to keep and
maintain that flow of traffic? I would hope that you would take the
opportunity to look at our Web site. It\'s www.itspublicsafety.net and
we have cards in the other room where the display is, to look at what we
are doing on the wireless E911 emergency medical services, nd we
continue looking forward to teaming up with the groups in this audience,
to be able to provide the safer, more efficient, mobility
transportation. Thank you.

MR. POMERANTZ: Hi. My name is Scott Pomerantz, and I head up a company
called Global Locate. I\'d like to thank Commissioner Abernathy for
inviting us here, and the rest of the wireless bureau, for hosting the
event, along with the Commission. While I have not participated in these
events in the past, I\'m delighted that the government is taking a role
that they are taking leading this, to facilitate compliance and safety
for all U.S. citizens, whether here or around the world.

It\'s only through a forum like this that we are able to separate fact
from fiction, and to move to solutions that actually work to meet these
demands of public safety.

We\'ve been busy at Global Locate for the past four years concentrating
on solving location, wireless location, specifically using AGPS and
targeting it to the non-synchronous world, the GSM world, that provides
a whole host of new problems and opportunities for companies like
myself, and we\'ve been working on that.

Just as a quick update of what we have and what everyone can expect out
there. We provide and end-to-end AGPS solution, and that\'s from the
point of view from the equipment vendors, so we have exclusively focused
on cell phones, again, only for AGPS. No other markets at this
particular point. The end-to-end solution comprises a network solution,
currently used at Nextel, for the 911 mandate. We have delivered the
assistance data for that network over the last year. We promised five
nines, and again, that means five minutes of down time for a year. We
exceeded that and we are quite proud of that.

To show cooperation in that network, Nextel uses a cell phone, a
handset, with someone else\'s AGPS, and we support that. Sometimes you
feel like Sybil, but you do in fact support the global carrier and are
highly successful and get some portion of that handset market. The
network solution from Global Locate needs to support 100 percent of the
carriers, customers, subs, and those that roam in and out of those
networks, and we continue to do that, and we commit for today and in the
future to do that as well.

On our chip set side, we have a two-chip set solution currently. We have
a road map obviously, like our friends over at Qualcomm, to get this
price down lower and lower, so that this becomes a non-issue for public
safety and no issue for expense. We\'re on our second generation chip
set. I can assure everyone in this room now that we\'ve been working and
focused on this area, and again it was quite difficult, handsets will be
available in quantity in 2004. Scaling, a few numbers in the beginning,
with multiple vendors coming out there. Our friends at Qualcomm told us
of another example that we would see in six-months time and we\'re
delighted. Our networks will support those, ours and everyone\'s.

Now it\'s in my best interest to get our chips in as many phones as
possible, so we\'re fighting. I just want you all to know that.

Our architecture is unique because the opportunity and the problems in
GSM were unique, and there are other vendors out there that have solved
the problem, and again, we look forward to all working together.

The conventional wisdom in the past was that all the technology was
available, and I think it was available in pieces for different parts of
the supply chain. Clearly GPS, AGPS, and CDMA has been available. It\'s
in the phones, it\'s out there, it\'s deployed, and it works
beautifully. I know that because we\'re out there in the market and we
see this constantly.

We know that the network portion is there, and that works beautifully
and flawlessly. Regarding the GSM handsets, again, they are coming. So
when we keep talking about the future, the future is still \-- 2004 is
in the future. We still need to enable this market before we can deliver
the promise of all the wonderful applications and the provisioning of
information that\'s so critical. So we need to take one step at a time.
We need to make sure that our wireless customers and our subs out there
are getting technology that actually works and performs, and is
affordable for the rural carriers, and for the tier one carriers here
and around the world, and you have out commitment to keep working and
providing solutions to meet those needs.

MR. MEER: Hi. I\'m Steve Meer. I\'m co-founder and chief technology
officer at Intrado. Like so many of the people that have been in this
industry and have had the opportunity to chat with you over the last
couple of days, I have a checkered and varied background, an engineer,
cop, paramedic by background who ultimately went on into private
practice, private business.

Intrado provides technology and service solutions for carriers and
others with 911 obligations, and to that end we have a pretty unique
view of this issue of 911 and data management and broad systems
operation in that we provide technology and systems that work inside the
PSAP, CPE, and mapping and other technologies at the PSAP. We have
services and products for wireless carriers, wire line carriers,
emerging telephony enablers who don\'t like to be called provider or
carriers, and a variety of other folks. So from this unique perspective
of how to tie things in to 911, we have some unique views of how we move
technology forward into the future.

I would tell you that one of the big challenges we see is that we have
lots, and lots, and lots of technology that we\'ve developed and spent
millions of dollars building over the years, that is sitting on my
credenza and in my filing cabinet waiting for a time to get out. In
1986, we were working with integrated CAD work stations. In 1989 we
geographically disbursed LAD databases. A number of the things you\'ve
heard about earlier today were running a live system in greater Harris
County, Texas with about 500 vehicles that are equipped with automatic
collision notification and inner-connectivity with the PSAP, so there
are a lot of these pieces. You\'ve heard a lot of people say the
technology is there. Clearly the technology is there.

I would like to, however, focus on a couple of issues of how the
business of technology happens, because I have to tell you that when
this all settles down, and when I look at the little widget sitting on
my credenza, what I realize is that the business of technology is broken
in 911 much more so than the technology in 911, and I think there are a
couple of fallacies and sort of common thoughts that happen that don\'t
get a lot of attention, the first one being that 911 runs on autopilot,
or that it can run on autopilot, and by adopting technology and putting
pieces together in a smarter way and using new tools, whether it\'s Web
services or XML or frame relay or any of the other things we\'ve heard
over the years, that suddenly, magically, this is all going to sort of
technology will take it away and it will work on autopilot, and
everything will be good and people will set their own filters and manage
their own links and a variety of things, and the reality is that my
staff of 750 people work with 7,000 PSAPs a month and the majority of
these PSAPs don\'t now how to man a link, they don\'t know how to read
the little green screen they have today that has 200 characters on it,
let alone the super deluxe XML-enabled browser, self-configuring
screens, and so there is absolutely an issue of training and ongoing
efficacy systems operability.

We did a test a few years ago where we surveyed some of the networks
that were connected into our environment for IP, TCPIP security, and we
found that virtually every agency that TCPIP in their enterprise, had
gaping TCPIP and network configuration system holes, security holes,
that would have enabled very easily denial of service attacks and other
things that would dramatically impair their networks. Huge problems.
These are things that need to be paid attention to and not just put into
the autopilot realm.

In our data systems that we support, the carriers and today, our systems
has over 200 million wire line records, and the change in those records
is somewhere north of a million records a day in all of the systems, and
one of the things that gets lost in this whole discussion is scale.
Frankly it\'s pretty easy to go take 500 cars in greater Harris County,
Texas and do automatic collision notification or go do wireless for
Knorr and Forchier, go do a number of other these things that we\'ve all
participated in over the years.

What turns out to be hugely problematic and not well understood by most
folks is this issue of what it looks like when you\'re doing this 200
million times, 200 million records in a database, millions of
transactions a day, tens of thousands of inner-connections, and the
scale issues become hugely challenging, and this is the kinds of
technology and the kinds of system architecture work that Intrado does
on behalf of our customers.

The last area I\'d like to comment on for just a second here is we\'ve
heard a lot of talk about citizens reaching into public safety and other
first responders messaging and moving information sideways, and forming
much more aggressive and appropriate responses. We think there\'s a huge
piece in public safety relative to outbound messaging, and the ability
to do very specific target notification to the public.

Our IntelliCast product is used by hundreds of agencies. In fact,
ironically enough, as I was flying here last night, our CEO\'s house
received a call from one of our platforms telling him that he was being
forced to evacuate because of the forest fire in Colorado, so it sort of
hit home last night. But the ability to have two-way dialogue in
meaningful context-sensitive two-way notifications we think is also a
very big part of the future, so I share quite a bit of the general
context of how this fits together and the need for messaging and open
standards and federated databases and all those other things. I don\'t
think there\'s any debate.

I think like all things, the devil is in the detail, the devil is in how
you put it together. You operate it, you think about it for scale, and I
think that largely that\'s an area that\'s not well understood, and I
would urge all of us to pay close attention as we move to the future
that we realize that those are the unintended consequences that you
spoke of earlier, and we use the analogy of an iceberg.  You have the
tip that\'s above the water line that everybody can see which is sort of
the \-- what everybody thinks about 911 and then, of course, there\'s
the huge body that wrecks ships and kills people under the water line
for all the intricacies and all the technical details and all the blood,
sweat and tears that it makes to keep it working, and you have to look
at the whole picture when you realize what it takes to make this work.
Thank you.

MR. NEIHARDT: Thank you. I\'m Jonas Neihardt with Qualcomm out of San
Diego, California, and most people know us in this context, assisted GPS
for cellular telephones, and I \-- but I don\'t want to talk about that
today because this panel is supposed to look forward to the future, and
I think if you look out five, six, ten years you\'re going to see
assisted GPS embedded in virtually all the devices that service in the
mobile telephony context, PDAs, et cetera, and that\'s going to happen
just because of Moore\'s Law. It\'s happening in the CDMA context
because orf Moore\'s Law, and as we discussed earlier, the parts cost
for adding assisted GPS to a CDMA telephone is in the range of 70 cents
right now, so we\'re able to burn the measurement capability into the
chip set that runs the phone, and it\'s not even priced separately now,
it\'s just a standard feature with those chip sets.

So what I wanted to talk about instead today is the technology that
we\'re developing to really implement an element of Dr. Potter\'s vision
that he laid out for emergency response, and this is what we were
demonstrating across the hall, which is a region-wide high-speed data
capability that is fully mobile and is based on the cellular
infrastructure, and I \-- we just took down our booth, but I brought one
of the PCs in.

This is a laptop that\'s using an air card right here, and this is what
we\'ve been \-- most of you I can see are familiar, were by the booth
today, but we tore our booth down before Commissioner came down, so I\'m
going to recover from that and let her look at it right now. All right.
I had to cover that base.

What Verizon has done here, to get back to Dr. Potter\'s vision, the way
I would restate what he\'s trying to do, or actually, he really said it
this way, but I\'ll say it again, and I\'m not really changing anything
he said, is that treating the public safety organizations like an
enterprise, and what companies like Verizon and my company and others
are doing in the mobile data context is enabling organizations and
businesses, private enterprise, to recreate the desktop experience for
their employees in a mobile setting, okay? So anywhere the employee is,
be he a real estate broker or a salesman or anything, you can have the
same experience in your car or on your person with your laptop or with a
PDA as you have on your desktop.

So let\'s take that concept and apply it to public safety, and with high
speed data technologies that we\'re rolling out now, we can make it
possible for the police officer in his cruiser or just walking around to
have the same data accessible and he has back in the station, or even an
FBI database if the officer sees someone that he wants to check out, you
can look at resources that either reside at your own station or data
that is somewhere else, and just to give you an explanation of how this
works, and why we think it\'s a powerful concept, is that what Verizon
had done in the D.C. area is put these special new transmitters on 290
of their base stations, essentially creating the same performance as a
Y5 hot spot but in an area that\'s 40 miles wide and contiguous and
seamless and is able to handoff between cell sites just like a cell
phone call, and what this means is that, as I said before, we were able
to recreate the desktop experience in a fully mobile setting anywhere in
the D.C. area, and they also have this up in San Diego.

Now, the card that\'s in the computer that I gave the Commissioner also
has a 1X mode too, and 1X is a data capability that runs at about 50 to
70 kilobytes per second and Verizon has that rolled out in the area
where about 85 percent of the population of the United States lives.

So you guys are from all over the country, I\'ve met a lot of you today,
many of you are served by that capability, and will either if you are
again, are in San Diego or D.C., can have the opportunity to use the
higher speed system, but in any case would default to the 1X technology.

So I went through all this today to tell you that the capabilities
coming around the corner are really in front of us right now. These \--
you know, a lot of you again, try the technology across the hall, come
up and see me after, or let\'s do a mobile tour just so we can really
conceptualize the ability to get the data out to the first responders,
the smart, fast information capability that Dr. Potter talked about. We
really do have that ability now and it\'s a very exciting thing. That\'s
it.

MR. AMAROSA: Thank you. The only question I have for Jonas, is where
were you ten years ago when I was trying to do this with 800 megahertz
and it wasn\'t working, and 400,000 people were looking for information
in radio closets. They were working the city of New York, but that
we\'ll discuss another time.

MR. NEIHARDT: I think the answer is that we had this but it was about a
semi tractor-trailer full of equipment.

MR. AMAROSA: I\'m sorry. I digressed. I\'m Mike Amarosa. I\'m with a
company called TruePosition. We\'re in the location technology business
of providing location for the wireless calls to 911. We handle all of
the air interfaces as you may have heard earlier. We\'ve been very
successful in our deployments to date. Our technology is here, it\'s
now, it is working. Our demonstration across the hall indicated various
types of things that we were able to do in looking at the future, as
well as the current 911 capabilities in the Chicago area and a rural
setting in Schaumberg, not in Chicago, and we\'ve been able to do some
stuff and really have been very, very effective.

Our products are working very well in an urban environment and a
suburban environment, and in selected rural environments as well, and
you find that the location capabilities that you have not only is good
for 911, but because of how accurate it has become, and the way it\'s
been working so well, that it just has a tremendous opportunity for the
future, and I think when you look at what the development is going to
look like in the next two to five years, because I really don\'t want to
think beyond that, because I think that you limit your creativity by
doing that. You see silos, I think, of information banks that you can
use location for.

Our idea is that any phone anywhere can be located, and if you work off
of that basis, you look at consumer information, you look at M-Commerce
information, you look at commercial and tracking-type of information as
well as the safety and security aspects of what we do on a regular
basis, and what most of us have been involved with.

Now if you just take the security and the safety aspect for a moment,
you know, beyond 911, and I\'m not looking at that in a small way, but
just if you look beyond that for a moment, you look at personal security
which has become a major issue. Auto, medical that you\'ve heard about
from Dr. Potter and the ComCARE Alliance, child location capability. One
of our panel participants talked about the Amber Alert system, this adds
on to that in the ability to track a child with a bracelet that they may
have on them. We always break down whenever our vehicle is on a road
that we don\'t know and it\'s late at night, so roadside assistance
becomes very important and the best way is to know exactly where you are
and be able to call at that given point in time.

In a parole situation, where you have probationers as well as parolees,
the ability to put them in a situation where you can track them,
especially when you\'re dealing with sex offenders at this point, this
is another area where location is very capable.

Emergency alerts. When we first started in this business and we were
down in the Houston, Texas area, there was a major problem with flooding
that was going on at that point in time, and we worked with the folks at
TransStar trying to develop conceptually what it would look like for an
incident manager to have screen in front of that individual at that
given point, have all the resources that they needed, public works,
police, fire, EMS, and be able to track what was going on and flash 911
calls on that as well, so you\'d know where the incidents were, have
safe evacuation routes out from flooded areas, have safe evacuation
routes like they need right now in California as the wildfires are going
forward. Again, predicated upon location.

Crash notification you heard about, what Intrado was doing down in the
Houston area in Texas. Again, all predicated on location, knowing
exactly where they are and responding as quickly as possible.

One of the other things that we found and I find it a bit humorous,
although I\'m a pet lover as well, but a lot of people are very
concerned about their pets, and putting collars on their pets so they
can locate their pets. You travel to any of this country today and you
see signs that are handmade and homemade that are up on walls, please
help me with a reward for locating their pets, and it\'s something that
everybody seems to be looking for. That\'s just in the safety and
security area. Those are the things that are on the board.

M-Commerce, the electric coupons, the advertising, the banner ads that
can be created. In a commercial setting you talk about dispatch and
tracking of vehicles and AVL capabilities, managing assets, especially
in high-end electronics where they tends to have legs and start to walk
a lot of these warehouse situations, where you can have palletized loads
that you\'ll be able to locate in controlled environments, traffic
management, not to supplement, but to add to the existing things in this
country today that ITS is so well worked on and perfected.

As you travel across some of the highways today, you get these smart
message boards to tell you within eight minutes you\'ll be at such and
such an intersection, to hit this route, et cetera. Add to that, put
this type of information with location that you can gain from a cell
phone and direction of travel as well can be gained from that, and you
start to get real time information in addition to the cameras and the
sensors that are out there today.

When you get to the consumer side, not only weather but traffic and
mobile games that can be put on it, friend finders, zone billing from
the carriers, concierge type services for those who travel around and
want to have specific restaurants and specific services when they\'re
located.

What I\'m trying to tell you is I think that we\'re limited only by our
own creativity as to what we can do with location capability today, and
I think the future is extremely bright not only from a safety and
security point of view, from this whole commerce point of view if you
look at that of what can be accomplished by being able to locate a
phone, by being able to locate you where you are, and based on that, and
your preference, and your wants, creating a profile that will give you
the information that goes on, and I think the future is very bright, and
that\'s where I see this whole location business going in the very next
two to five years, in the very distant \-- not in the very distant, but
in the very near future. So, that\'s where we see technologies moving.
Thank you.

COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Thank you very much, and I want to again, thank
all of our panelists for coming, spending the afternoon with us, talking
about where we see the future going with technology. We are at our
terminating time. If anyone has a burning question, I\'m happy to take
it, but if not, these folks will be around to answer some questions,
I\'m sure, for a few minutes.

What it said to me basically is that we\'re on the verge of yet another
breakthrough when it comes to personal safety, public safety, traffic
management, consumer applications, stress reducers, i.e. is Independence
Avenue going to be open today or closed today? All those kinds of issues
that go beyond where we started, which was when you call 911, we want to
be able to locate you and we want to be able to locate you if that call
was made on a wireless phone.

That\'s where we started a good five, six years ago, and we started in
an environment where it was a technology that was not built around
location. Wireless was never designed, in fact, to do location. But when
governments gets in the forefront about why this is important, and
industry comes along and technology comes along, we now have a whole new
generation of applications and support that I think are critical in the
world that we\'re living, so again, I want to thank everyone for coming
today.

The FCC looks forward to working with all of you and the Department of
Transportation. We\'re partners in this, no doubt. Every piece of the
puzzle relates back to issues dealing with transportation in many, many
instances, and we know that in this country we\'ve been able to
accommodate multiple technologies and applications that\'s led to
competition and has led to lower prices and greater choice, so I think
the key for us is to make sure that we\'ve got interoperability and
flexibility and multiple ways to deliver these services to consumers, so
we look forward to continuing to work with all of you.

Again, I want to thank all of you, and I believe John Muleta is here to
close out the program.

MR. MULETA: Thank you, Commissioner. We were trying find a way of sort
of circling the last two days, and they asked me to be the clean-up
hitter, so I was thinking about the implications of that, so I\'m in
sort of the category of Sammy Sosa and Reggie Jackson, so I think it\'s
kind of cool that they asked me to do this.

What I wanted to do today, and if we can get the slides going on, is
just kind of summarize as to where we\'ve been, where we\'re going,
where we are \-- let me start over. Where we\'ve been, where we are, and
where we need to go to, so before I do that, I just sort of want to
thank first of all all of the commissioners and the leadership of
Chairman Powell and all the other commissioners who\'ve been active in
this issue, who have, I think, been the main drivers in getting us to
where we are, and for them sort of challenging the staff that we\'ve
gotten to where we are now talking about getting things done as opposed
to, you know, at the point where we haven\'t even started doing things.

Also for the event today, I want to thank the leadership of Brian
Scherman, the chief of staff, and Cheryl Wilkerson who is Chairman
Powell\'s new legal advisor, for their guidance and leadership, and also
on my staff Kathy Seidel and of course, Lauren Patrich, who was heading
up the coordination effort, and Genie Barton who is the principal legal
person on this, as well as Dan Grosh and Patrick Forster, who have been
involved in th is, and of course, Andra, I want to thank you for all
your help, that\'a Andra Cunningham, for all her help in getting this
organized.

I also want to make sure that I recognize the other staff members in the
policy division and also the great efforts of Dane Snowden and David
Fisk, and their respective organizations, that\'s Consumer and
Governmental Affairs and Office of Media Relations that helped make this
event the success that it is. Most of all, I want to thank all of you,
both at the state and commercial side who have been involved in making
this happen. We are here to help you get your states and your companies
help deploy a critical piece of infrastructure that the American people
value tremendously.

That said, what I\'ll do is kind of review. If we can go to the next
page, you know this is sort of \-- this page is really a summary of
lessons that we learned last time, and I think they are true today too.
In the previous coordination initiative, the clear thing that came out
was that E911 is not really one person\'s, or one organization\'s
responsibility. Everybody needs to be involved in it, and it\'s set up
that way. It\'s not a question of, you know, it\'s sort of falling into
many pieces. It\'s designed to be a coordination issue. It\'s really the
sort of right balance between personal privacy issues, local state
interests, and the federal interests in having a great framework.

I think the key asset that we need to focus on in what this meeting is
all about is leadership and vision, and we need to have leaders who have
the vision, and are willing to be forward leaning as our defense
secretary said. That\'s the kind of leadership we need at E911, and
again, I ask everybody to help us get there, both in leadership and
having the vision.

The state impact here is significant, that\'s why we\'re focusing on the
coordinators. We have a central person that we can go to to provide that
leadership, to provide that advocacy, and that goes not only on the
policy side, but also on the financial side. We need to keep that.

The rural or smaller carrier issue is very challenging, and it\'s why
we\'ve taken some of the actions that we\'ve taken recently. The
challenge that I put out to everybody is really what we said in our
order, the state order that we issued recently. Come to us with a level
of factual information that helps us make the right decision with regard
to E911. Okay? The goal I think is 100 percent compliance. The question
is, how do we get there, what are the barriers to getting there, and how
do we resolve them on a timely basis? But we do not want E911 valleys.
That I don\'t think makes sense from a public policy point of view, and
I think we all need to get committed to 100 percent compliance and
let\'s figure out, how do we solve the problem, not about taking
defensive postures or sort of creating barriers to implementation in
certain pockets.

On law and policy issues, I think what you heard this morning from the
legislators and also yesterday morning, is that they are very committed
to this issue, that this issue has taken on a greater degree of
importance than it ever has. I think the pending legislation, you know,
we hear is due any time, hopefully next week. There is a recognition
that there\'s a lot of resources already available, but that there needs
to be more resources dedicated to understanding the impact of E911 in
terms of the national infrastructure, national defense infrastructure,
and I think that\'s where a lot of this drive is coming from.

I think there is a great deal of commitment in other parts of the
federal governments. The Department of Transportation has been an active
player, and will continue to be an active player. RUS has a significant
amount of resources available in terms of money. I think in terms of
Homeland Security it is part of their charter, at least that\'s our
understanding, and I think what we need to do is to make sure that there
is a greater degree of coordination and contacts and learning that goes
on on both sides of the table, to make sure that this funding that\'s
available in the various areas is used to the benefit of E911. Go to the
next page please.

I want to recognize the four organizations, all three of them whom spoke
here in the last couple of days, but I think for all the commercial and
all the state organizations, please use these resources. They have a
tremendous amount of information, they can help you get things done, and
you know, we will help, but you know, these organizations are set up to
focus on this issue, so that\'s NENA and the SWAT, APCO\'s Project
Locate, the ESIF are all organizations that can help with these issues,
and also I want to mention NASNA, the National Association of State 911
Administrators, Steve Marsolf from Virginia is the head of that. You
know, he came representing his state, the Commonwealth. I have to call
it the Commonwealth because I live there, so you can\'t call it a state.
It\'s like you go to the University of Virginia. You cannot say like
you\'re a junior. You\'re a third year. It\'s a very unusual state in
that respect. So the Commonwealth. So he didn\'t have a chance to speak
about NASNA, but that\'s another organization that\'s available and we
hope that you take advantage of what they have as resources.

In terms of deployment issues, if you could go to the next page. I think
two things to take away. One is you\'ve got to think about the
leadership issues. You\'ve got to \-- if you\'re a carrier, you\'ve got
to take the leadership. This is an important public policy thing,
consumers want it. I think there\'s no question that people appreciate
the services. Take the leadership position. Don\'t follow, lead. I think
the other thing is, I\'m an engineer by background so, you know,
decisions, don\'t make decisions lightly in terms of architecture. Think
about these issues, get all the resource help you can from the NENAs,
APCOs, and all the carriers, do the due diligence, make sure the
architecture is a flexible long-term solution before committing to that.
Again, keeping in mind that the public policy goal is 100 percent
compliance.

I think the things that we need to do is focus on the three Cs,
coordination, cooperation and communication. I apply this in my house
with my four-year-old twins. I do a lot of communication, they do a lot
of coordination among themselves, and very little cooperation with me,
but anyway, this I think is different. You all are not four-year-old
twins, so I think the three Cs will actually work here. We\'re all
committed to this. This affects all of us personally, so let\'s keep
that in mind.

I think that what you\'re going to see coming forth is a greater focus
on consumer awareness and cost recovery issues. I think consumers are
going to \-- this is a general trend on wireless that I strongly believe
in, that consumers are going to be the principal drivers in the wireless
face, meaning that it\'s not a question of whether Denny Strigl at
Verizon Wireless wants to do this or not, his customers are going to
say, we want this. Okay? So this is going to be a fundamental shift of
the way that we look at the world, and I think it\'s important to keep
that in mind.

There is \-- the FCC is helping educate that. I think it\'s important
that the carriers and the PSAP community also educate their consumers,
which are all of our consumers, and get them to understand what these
systems are capable and also make sure that we are keeping track of
consumers\' expectations as the technology evolves, as sort of end-user
technology evolves. You know, people wont\' be using these sort \--
there won\'t be a dedicated phone for wireless devices in the future,
and so how do we incorporate E911? How do we deal with RFID type of
issues? How do you deal with the subsequent issues that come out of it?
That requires education and dialogue with consumers.

Cost recovery and proper management of distribution of funds is
obviously a hot issue. I would just apply common sense rule. If you are
advising either your carrier leadership or your state leadership, you
know, this is an area not to make a mistake in. Use the funds for what
they are. These are \-- you know, they\'re specifically obligated. I
think the best thing to do is to use them for the goals that they\'ve
been set aside for, and I think the state advocates can coordinate and
help the carrier community and the equipment suppliers and target this
money for the deployment to get to 100 percent compliance.

If we go to the next page. In terms of rural issues, I think what we are
looking for is that the time and accuracy concerns are real. We
understand that. We need again, the goal is 100 percent compliance. We
need to just figure out what the path is to 100 percent compliance.
There are financial hurdles, but clearly there are situations where
public policy and sort of short-term financial hurdles are, you know,
come to the crossroads. We need to sort through them. I think we\'ve
identified a tremendous amount of financing resources that are available
if you can just get to access them, and that leads to the next thing,
which is that the statewide coordinators can be helpful in that respect.
So this is not something that the carriers have to carry all by
themselves. The central points of contacts in the states can help. The
FCC can help. The DOT can help. All of the other organizations, RUS, can
help, and Department of Homeland Security can help.

If we go to the next page, I\'m talking real fast, but I think the
challenge that you saw, the last panel, is we have a variety of
technologies. They\'re available for different circumstances. But at the
same time, we have a technology that\'s evolving at the speed of
Moore\'s Law, in which processing power doubles every two years, every
18 months, and you know, we cannot in this area be continuously lagging
the technology, so we need to figure out how to deal with these issues.

The FCC is taking on this challenge. We have identified two forums in
which we will try and identify these issues on a forward leaning basis.
One is in the Technology Advisory Council, and the other one is in the
National Network Reliability and Interoperability Council where we\'re
trying to frame these issues. I\'ve asked Dale Hatfield and some other
folks in the technical field to help us. People like Paul Kolodsy who is
the director of the Spectrum Policy Task Force here at the FCC before he
went on to the Stephens Institute. He\'s working with public safety
folks. We are asking these sort of leading edge thinkers to think about
these issues and say, what does the next ten years look like? Where do
we want to end up five years from how? Where do we want to end up ten
years from now? What\'s a roadmap that we need to be at?

We\'re not advocating a particular position, but I think at the end of
the day what we need to do is to say, here\'s some consensus as to
what\'s going on. What is Qualcomm doing and how is that going to create
a disruptive force in an E911 environment? It\'s an intended
consequence. Technology is going to move ahead and we need to make sure
that we\'re sort of thinking about these futuristic issues.

I think, if we can go to the next page, the purpose of these two days\'
worth of meetings has been to create a forum for level setting among all
the states, and all the carriers, and the rest of the community. This is
part of the three Cs, but I think what we wanted to do is now that all
50 states have identified a coordinator, we needed to create a uniform
environment in which everybody has the same sort of learning, or at
least access to learning, so this information will be available on Web
sites, you know, send it to your colleagues and peers, get the word out,
because there\'s lots of resources available.

Now that we\'ve done the level-setting, I think now we need to go the
era of achievement as the Chairman has spoken about. You know, there\'s
no excuse. You can\'t say, I don\'t know that this stuff is available.
We\'ve had the forums. We\'ve had two of them. So, let\'s see what we
can do. Let\'s take it to the next level. Let\'s get a high level of
penetration and, you know, 40 states and figure out what we need to do
in the last ten, which might have difficult environments to deal with.
So I think that\'s a goal that we\'re trying to do here.

I think we want to work with the state designees, so we\'ve done some of
our homework in bringing you here. I think what I want to do is
challenge the state folks and ask you to do some homework. Tell us
what\'s going on in your states. Okay? We\'re asking the carriers to
report to us as to what\'s going on, but I think we are going to give
you a set of packages and sort of like a homework assignment
environment, tell us what\'s going on in your states, give us granular
data, tell us what problems there are so we can focus on the problems.
Let\'s remove the roadblocks. Let\'s get to this era of achievement.
Okay?

Now, I hate to close by giving a homework assignment. That really sucks,
doesn\'t it? It\'s like goodbye, and all of a sudden I\'m giving you a
homework assignment. But no. Look at this homework assignment as a
positive thing. We\'re all assigned to a job. The best way we can do it
is if we have information, and what we\'re really asking in this
homework assignment is for you to give us information to make your jobs
easier, to help you with your advocacy. Because you\'ve got to go in and
fight with the legislators, with the governors, with all the others that
are resource sinks that exist our there.

But this is the one thing that affects all of us, in every state that we
go in, and so I really ask you guys and gals and whatever inappropriate
language I\'m using to describe you, to help us with this homework
assignment. Report back to us. We won\'t mandate it like we do with the
carriers, but let\'s continue the dialogue, but the dialogue is about
what\'s going on in your states, what issues you see.

With that, I ask all of you who have spent the last 48 hours, and that
includes sleep time, drive time, plane time, I really thank you for
being here, for making the effort, all of the carriers, all of the staff
that has made this. I think this is a tremendous amount of progress that
we\'re making and you know, I look forward to dealing with all the
issues that are forthcoming. Thank you very much for your time.

(Whereupon the above-entitled proceeding was adjourned at 4:48 p.m.)