February 17, 2009


Canadians seldom pay any attention to the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. It's
one of those faceless bureaucracies that appears to make
routine decisions that affect no one.

It does mundane things like cutting off thousands of
Kamloops' TV viewers in from over-the-air broadcasts of CBC
TV. But other than letting the CBC run contrary to its
mandate and license, no one has died from want of TV.

Not so when it comes to the failure of the CRTC to enforce
regulations for Internet phone companies. They are required
to provide 911 emergency service for customers. When they
don't, it becomes a matter of life and death.

Melvin Luck found out the hard way when he dialed 911 to
report that his son was turning blue and had stopped
breathing. He reasonably expected that an ambulance would
arrive shortly at his Calgary home. Instead, an ambulance
was sent to his old address in Ontario.

My original thought was that it must be the fault of the
Lucks for not forwarding their new address to Internet phone
company. But they did.

It's the responsibility of the company to establish the 911
service, not the customer. They were supposed to hire a
call center to set up the service. But the call center was
apparently unaware of their obligations.

When a reporter from the Globe and Mail phoned the call
center that represents the Internet phone company, they did
a lot of sales promotion for optional services but never
once mention the 911 service.

Also, the company was supposed to provide stickers to be
applied to the phone advising users that they might have to
give their location to an operator in case of a emergency.
Instead, the distributed stickers said "911 limitations
exist."

If it were an ordinary phone line, the telephone company
would have immediately located the source of the call. Their
automatic locater works even if the caller can't speak
because they are injured or in harms way.

If the CRTC were doing its job, they would have checked to
see that the Internet phone company was following the rules.
But they didn't.

Internet phone companies claim that they are doing their
best but thats not good enough. One former CRTC
commissioner earlier warned companies: "I don't want to be
overdramatic, but if you were selling cars and you told us
they didn't have brakes yet, but you were giving it your
best shot, we would be nervous."

I can only assume from his comments that former
commissioners used to be made of stiffer stuff.

There is a simple solution that cuts out the call center
completely. It's already in place in some American States.
They cross-reference the cable company's records with those
of Internet phone companies. It only cost pennies per
customer.

Cell phone users aren't much better off, as Matt Anderson
tragically discovered as he lay freezing in the snow in the
middle of nowhere south of Williams Lake. He called 911
three times and was told help was on the way. Hours later,
police tracked his footsteps in the snow only to find his
frozen body.

There is a better way of tracking cell phone users than
following their footsteps in the snow. Again, the U.S.
leads the way. "We can do it in as little as 15 seconds"
said the chief technology officer for a company that finds 5
million cell phone users a month in the U.S.

A bitter irony is that some of the technology used in the
U.S. was developed in Canada. The technique involves the
Global Positioning System that uses triangulation to find
the caller. The technology is more than a decade old and 93
per cent of American callers are covered.

Why doesn't the CRTC force cell phone companies to provide
the service? They know of the service and what it would
cost. According to documents obtained by the Globe and Mail
the problem could be solved for $50 million; a relatively
small amount compared to the billions they rake in annually.

And cell phone companies already collect 911 fees from cell
phone users estimated to be $160 million each year. Where
does the money go, if not to provide emergency service? We
don't know because the CRTC doesn't require disclosure but
it appears that only a small fraction is actually spent.

The CRTC is more interested in protecting the broadcast
industry than Canadians and the federal government seems
content to leave it that way.
 

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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