Changes Are Coming for 911 Calls Across BC | The Tyee

NG911 will be more resilient to extreme weather caused by climate change because it is no longer reliant on a single phone cable, said Ivan Rincon, executive director of project management at the Ministry of Citizens’ Services in B.C. The IP-based system is “based on the cloud,” he said, referencing Apple’s iCloud, which allows you to store files on the internet to be accessed using multiple devices

Er, what!?!!??!

Say you don’t understand what NG911 is without saying you don’t understand what NG911 is, The Tyee.

To add a bit of sanity here, NG911 is moving from a voice-only telephony service to a cloud-hosted service that can handle voice, text, and other IP-based communication. It appears to use a similar format to what BC Health moved to a few years back, so that people can access reports online and validate/update data on an opened ticket. The RCMP also already uses a similar system.

I like the idea of knowing which room and floor you're on in an emergency, and the system looks neat, but who maintains the mapping?

In our case, we had to; and filling in all that information and keeping it current on the pbx system is a surprisingly dumb and time-consuming job.

Side thought. My phone is registered with a tablet sim and cannot make or receive calls or SMS traffic. It's Skype/fbmsgr/hangouts(or whatever it's called this week) but no phone stuff. And my Skype out comes from Seattle or so.

I'm pretty sure this won't work for me. I hope my outlier status isn't anything like common, but I do think more zoomies are gonna ditch the classic phone number and just use WhatsApp or signal or telegram, and the source of the emergency call could become as difficult to suss as it is important.

(No. I'm not saying EComm911 should get and use a FB account for messages or anything else)

[Sorry for typos. I hope I've got them all]