May 22, 2008

Toddler Dies After 911 Call Over VoIP

Edmonton's emergency services have issued a warning about the use of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) phone service following the death of a Calgary toddler.
Eighteen-month-old Elijah Luck died after his family called 911 over a VoIP phone and the ambulance was dispatched to their former home in Ontario instead of their current home in Calgary.
It took two ambulances 40 minutes to get to him thanks to one ambulance being dispatched to the wrong city. The tragic death of 18-month-old Elijah Luck demonstrates the critical differences between the 911 services of traditional land-lines and phone companies that now use voice over Internet technology.
Elijah Luck went into medical distress and his family made an emergency call for an ambulance. However thanks to the nomadic VOIP service they were using the emergency services were shown the wrong address information and dispatched an ambulance in Mississauga, Ontario, more than twenty-five-hundred miles away.
Comwave says the Internet phone technology is transportable so there's no physical address attached to the numbers.
Cellphones work better than "nomadic" connections — like those used by VoIP phone providers Comwave and Vonage — because emergency responders get a phone number and a location of the nearest cellphone tower, but are still more limited than landlines, […]