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A comment on 911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage. Parent comment

Re:911 emergency services go down across the US after Centur... by StudentStuff on Friday December 28, 2018 @04:32AM (#18775782)
911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate. There are thousands of (poorly run, uncoordinated) Public Safety Answering Points across the country, and most tend to contract with just the local incumbent telecom, ensuring any time there is an issue with said incumbent, every call to said PSAP fails.

In the context of most of these PSAPs having already moved to VOIP, there isn't a coherent reason why these calls shouldn't go straight from the carrier originating the call to the PSAP, without middlemen like Centurylink standing by to misroute those calls.

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Re:911 emergency services go down across the US after Centur... by ecp9 on Friday December 28, 2018 @01:39PM (#18778558)
I mean if you want to get into the history of any technology you can point out how archaic and horrible it was initially. We're still in that phase with the internet, in 50 years people are going to read about things TCP/IP and Facebook and Comcast and won't be able to stop laughing hysterically at how bad and flimsy it all was.
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Re:911 emergency services go down across the US after Centur... by JadeNB on Sunday December 30, 2018 @11:13PM (#18792963)
> 911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate.

I'm always interested in Chicago history, so I went looking, but couldn't find anything at, for example, https://www.nena.org/page/911overviewfacts . Do you know anywhere this history is written up?

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Re:911 emergency services go down across the US after Centur... by JadeNB on Monday December 31, 2018 @10:02PM (#18798657)
Ah, I may have seen what you mean. According to https://www.countyofunion.org/site/cpage.asp?cpage_id=180009... :

> 1976 Chicago claims to have had "the first enhanced 911 system of any major city" in the United States.

… so I guess in

> > 911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate.

you meant E911 (which, as the linked page points out, is a nebulously defined and variously implemented technology), not necessarily 911?

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