MTE - E911

I am using 911 enable. What is expensive about $1.50 per location if you can pass it on to the end user? The only initial barrier is a monthly minimum. We (ITSPs) are legally required to provide E911 for our customers whereby 911 calls are immediately routed to the correct PSAP. A direct connection to the Intrado network is _very_ expensive (I was told $5k per month). Fortunately companies like 911enable and dash911 have become resellers of entrado connections.

If I were you I'd be sweating bullets right now. If any of your customers try to call 911 and cant get through and complications of the emergency arise; they could take you to the cleaners in liabilities. This is aside from hefty FCC fines and fees.

FWIW most wholesale sip providers also don't provide 911 service so don't think its a limitation of your PRI.

As part of our turnup on installations we actually call 911 from the customer's premise and confirm its showing the correct name, number, and address. We also confirm this is the correct PSAP for that address. That way, should for any reason a future problem arise, customer caused or equipment error; we have a record of it working correctly during installation as proof of good faith effort.

Before we had 911enable we had to use an FXO port ATA (linksys 3102) to connect up to an analog line at the premesis and they shared it with the fax. We used that connection to dial out 911. It was never used in an emergency but the theory seemed OK. However, $1.50/mo for the customer versus $41 for the 1FB POTS is a huge difference. If conditions permitted, we could/would use a 1MB POTS line shared with the alarm panel ($20/mo but 20cents per call).

I haven't had a single complaint out of 911enable. Albeit their min monthly got raised to $150, its still significantly cheaper than $5k. I charge my customers $3/location so at 75 locations the min has been covered. You could also charge per 'line' that you sell even though you only code 1 entry per location with 911enable. You can easily use dialplan to lock down the callerid for 911 calls.

We signed our agreement with 911Enable today, and we are doing our sip test tomorrow. The have been very responsive so far, and it seems to be a very well documented process.

Eric, I wondered if you had any trouble at all or could give us any tips for setting them up on MTE. I have two of their trunks set up, and I have two or three more that I will set up before we do the test. I'm planning to set the route up using tl-dialout-2-trunks to route the calls.

I wonder if their pricing model has changed since you signed up. They quoted us $1,500 one time, 90 cents per month per customer, and 50 cents per month per extension. Sounds like they have an excellent product, and I'm excited about getting e911 where it should have been all along.

well ALL my calls go through my routing box, including 911. Now keep in mind how 911enable works if an unidentified callerid shows up to them, they send it to a call center to make sure it routes OK but charge you like $75. Now think about that 'preserve original callerid' option on forwarded calls and how that could really bite if someone call forwarded to 911 :).

So a tenant sends a call to my gateway box, which if its 911 re-applies callerid(num) so there is no possible way to get it wrong :)

Sounds like that gateway asterisk box of yours is a really good idea. For the short term we probably just made the decision to not allow tenants to change their caller id.

I have used a company called Vixxi Solutions http://www.vixxisolutions.com. They're pretty good, but their minimum monthly is $200 I think.

Anytime I get a customer that wants to change their Caller ID number / ANI, I make them sign a waiver that says they can only change DIDs to ones that they are assigned, and also makes them accept full responsibility to send the correct ANI for both 911 and toll free calling. I have some customers that want to use a toll-free number as an ANI, and that doesn't play well for those types of calls.

2 problems with that scenario raven.

1. Obviously you need a way so that if they call 911 the callerid is going to be hard-coded and cannot be customer over-written, this only needs to exist on 911 calls leaving the remaining patterns using a different mechanism.

2. using a toll-free number as a CallerID not only wrecks callerid name (there is no CNAM database for toll free numbers) but could cost you financially. A lot of more advanced call networks use source and destination numbers as a determination as to if the call is billable. A lot of wholesale SIP providers, i know, work in this manner. There is no such thing as a local calling area for a toll free number. Additionally the toll-free callerid results in having to pay LD at your highest billing tier. I wonder if the customer is aware that by doing this they are agreeing to pay for every single call they make (even ordering lunch down the street) at a high tiered long distance rate?

Telemarketers that use toll-free callerid do so by purchasing a LD trunk (PRI) and placing all their calls out that trunk. They essentially pay the contracted LD rate for every call they make to achieve that goal.

Just make sure that by letting them do this toll-free CallerID, you financially take a hit meanwhile your billing software continues business as usual. We discovered this in spring 2007, and it was costing us $400 a month just in calls for a customer paying $225/mo for the entire service. Even the calls that we charged $0.05/min on were being charged to us at $0.065/min as opposed to $0.025/min because of the source phone number. It was 3 or 4 months before the issue was discovered brought to my attention by accounting; another 1 - 2 to understand how and why we were charged those rates.

How are you handling extensions? During testing, 911Enable gets the extension number only, which can't be dialed back because the tenant name has been stripped. If I set the callerid to the DID and they try to return the call it goes to the IVR instead of the extension that dialed 911.

i dont use extension bind, i just use callerid 10 digit. Reaching the IVR on callback is really no different than a customer on a PRI that had an IVR.

I'll check deeper to see if I am experiencing the scenario you decribe on the rate. I don't think we're taking hits for it as our domestic termination is flat rate for the most part, and haven't seen any crazy bills yet. It is a pain, but, as the customer demands, he gets. Of course, we always put stuff in our contracts that allows a chargeback when the customer makes some kind of weird call, gets coin calls, etc.