The increased adoption of VoIP services is allowing a growing number of businesses to enhance their communications capabilities while realizing telephony cost savings previously unimaginable. The same trend, however, is driving an increased focus on the availability of emergency services for VoIP users. The FCC (News - Alert), in fact, has set E911 standards at the Federal level, also defining penalties, including potential civil and criminal liability for failure to abide by its orders.

 

However, the fact remains that a large number of service providers have yet to provide adequate 911 services in conjunction with their VoIP services — despite FCC mandates. In fact, as many as 60 million American workers in facilities that have adopted VoIP technology are not provided adequate E911 protection.

 

E911 vendors, however, are doing their part to advocate the adoption of their services — of course, for their gain, but also for the benefit of VoIP end users.

 

RedSky (News - Alert) Technologies provides automated E911 solutions for enterprise VoIP customers. In order to effectively make use of emergency services, businesses need to be able to track the location of their IP-based endpoints, since one of their many benefits is plug and play portability.

 

RedSky’s E911 Manager is designed to integrate with an enterprise communications platform to automatically manage and track location information for every analog, digital, and IP device on the network. This means that users can move about freely without having to manually enter new location information.

 

Now, RedSky is introducing E911 Anywhere, which centralizes location tracking and emergency call routing. E911 Anywhere tracks and locates IP devices anywhere, within the enterprise or outside, and is then able to route calls to the appropriate PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point), ensuring the correct emergency facilities are contacted. 

 

Importantly, RedSky accomplishes this without using costly 911 trunks by using the enterprise WAN to place the emergency calls to RedSky’s infrastructure and service provider partners. The service is available to any device on the network — IP, digital, or analog, softphones, SIP devices, etc. 

 

“E911 Anywhere is the perfect emergency calling solution for large, distributed enterprises that have made a commitment to IP telephony,” says Nicholas Maier, RedSky’s Senior Vice President. “E911 Anywhere ensures that 911 callers get the help they need quickly while also offering large enterprises a way to save tens of thousands of dollars per month.”

 

Added options include call recording and bifurcation, which are particularly useful for very large enterprises operating their own PSAPs.

 

Naturally, E911 Anywhere integrates with E911 Manager, which provides device location information to E911 Anywhere, which then routes calls appropriately anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.

 

E911 Anywhere service is priced based on the number of devices on the IP network.