There actually has been an economic analysis done in Europe by a group under contract to the European Commission. You can see this report at http://www.telematica.de/locus/reports.html, and then download and review the D1 report. Quoting the Cost-Benefit points from section 3.2.5 of the document: "...An automatic transmission of the coordinates, which determine the position of the caller in near-real-time and independent from his personal ability to describe a location will results in an enormous improvement of the efficiency of rescue operations. Another important factor for the rescue operation is the availability of telephones or other means of initiating an emergency alarm. The increasing equipment ratio of the European citizens with mobile phones reduces the dependency on fixed infrastructure and reduces therefore the time span between accident and alarm of the relevant call centre...Studies for "In-car-systems" regarding the time-benefit which could be achieved by sending the emergency call immediately after the distress event and sending out an automatic location information in terms of coordinates have been performed. This can be compared to the time saving for a mobile caller using an enhanced ECS....shows that a reduction of the average rescue time for accident outside settlements of approximately 50% could be achieved by using automatic systems. This is due to the possibility to transmit the emergency call immediately after the event of distress, which saves 8,5 minutes in average (including the immediate discovery of the accident and the immediate availability of a communication link) and the saving of another minute by reduced travel time for the mobile rescue team due to the accurate position information of the site of the accident.... A simulation made in Germany for a number of 3000 emergency calls has shown that the investment of 5 Mllion Euro (for the equipment of 650 PSAPS) could result in a total economic benefit of 1.3 bill. Euro. (assumption: 30% equipment-ratio for vehicles). In 1997 6470 persons died in Germany in accidents within urban environment, improved rescue operations are assumed to save 12% (776 persons). In the same year 2080 persons have died in rural environment. For this conditions an improvement of 7% (146 persons) is assumed. The total number of persons assumed to be rescued is 922. Extrapolating these results to an European dimension (45000 deadly accidents) the number of saved lives would be 4853....Average cost figures per injured people, as provided by the German "Bundesamt fur Stra?enwesen", are: . Deadly injured: 800 000 Euro . Heavily injured: 37 000 Euro . Slightly injured: 3 600 Euro Estimations, which take into account the migration from a certain amount of deadly injured to heavily injured and from heavily injured to slightly injured, result in a macroeconomic benefit of 1,3 billion Euro in Germany by the implementation of enhanced ECS for car drivers." I'm not making any statements good or bad here, just that someone has done the work. Tim Dunn, ENP Openwave Systems ---------------------- The data base in question is the Coordinate Routing Data Base (CRDB), defined by TR45.2 in J-Std-36. The boundaries contained in this entity are for routing of Wireless calls. THis can be a much larger serving area than a Wireline call(fixed location) would require. For example all calls in parts of California go to the same Highway Department PSAP. ---------------------- Discussion on Jan. 28, 2004 25% of top 100 metro areas have one PSAP per county, while the rest has more than one. However, for 80-90% of rural counties with fewer than 75,000 inhabitants, there is one 911 entity. City boundaries are the smallest PSAP boundary. 6000-6500 PSAPs, but roughly 4,000 counties in US St. Louis has 39 PSAPs, Kansas City metro area has 44. city borders change due to annexations, but county boundaries are fairly static, with apparently no changes in the United States in the last decade. City boundaries may not be contiguous, due to annexations. Example: Long Beach, CA Many states do not have a state 911 authority. Point & polygon routing is in progress, but very difficult, since currently 99% of areas are not geo-equipped. ---------- Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 9:46 PM To: Rosen, Brian Subject: Re: Do PSAP boundaries cross township/city boundaries In some cases PSAP boundaries still follow rate center lines which were used initially for determining appropriate response scenarios. For example, fire and EMS departments would establish an agreement with a town whose customers were served off the same switch and who had basic 9-1-1 calls routed to their facility (they had 9-1-1 and the neighboring switch did not) for sending first response. When those communities got E911, they kept the old boundaries. This scenario is fairly common in states that have recently adopted E9-1-1 (within the last 5 years). Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine are some examples. Two communities in Vermont are Hartford and Hartland (Hartford PSAP answers for the Northern part of Hartland). Out west it occurred near the community of Laguna Seca (Monterey County) - two communications centers (Salinas and Monterey) - where the breaking point between the two was the Laguna Seca area which coincided with the rate center boundary and not the town lines Two-stage call handling is not uncommon and in fact, is becoming more and more common as 9-1-1 facilities consolidate for economic reasons. In my Vermont example police are indicated for the Hartland area using a different ESN than the Hartford area. Once the call taker hits the police transfer button it automatically goes to State Police even though the call is handled at the Hartford Police facility. Fire and EMS still indicate Hartford as the correct response agency though. I either dispatch for my local police department or I transfer the call to a dispatch point that handles the police response for a a particular area (based on ESN - if it is available). Their is also the potential to have a limited secondary PSAP at particular dispatch locations which would be capable of handling transferred ALI/ANI information (in Vermont we have 25 of them connected to our network via ISDN (D Channel) which I will soon be migrating to less expensive VPN over Broadband). Without LSP facilities at the dispatch center, information is transmitted orally. It's actually a three-way call. The original call taker stays on the line and adds the police dispatcher (this can vary from agency to agency depending on local policies and procedures). PSAP CPE recommendations call for at least the ability to create a six-way bridge to support this functionality (add dispatch, poison control, suicide hotline etc etc).