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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that landlines are becoming obsolete technology. An increasing number of households have disconnected their landline phones, because many residents already have mobile phones with signals strong enough to work inside their homes. To the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), this trend poses a potential problem for emergency response teams. Currently, when a 911 call is placed from a landline, the emergency dispatcher automatically receives the caller’s address, which helps them respond quicker. This is especially important in cases where the emergency prevents the caller from being able to tell the dispatcher his or her location.

The beauty of the landline is that it is attached to a specific location, whereas mobile phones are, well, mobile. The FCC’s solution is to require that all mobile phones, including T-Mobile new cell phones, are equipped with GPS tracking technology by 2018. When a 911 call is placed from a GPS-equipped phone, dispatchers can easily access the GPS tracking information and respond accordingly. The plan was established in September 2010, giving cell phone providers an eight-year period to make these changes.

The FCC expects implementing GPS tracking to all phones will not be very difficult or expensive for providers. In fact, most 2G and 3G mobile phones “shipped by manufactures were equipped with GPS-chips. By the end of the eight-year implementation period, network-based carriers will likely have complied with their location accuracy benchmarks by ‘blending in’ such location-capable handsets,” said the FCC.

In order to meet the FCC’s requirements, 85 percent of a company’s users are required to have GPS-equipped mobile phones. According to the FCC, by 2018 “the public safety community, wireless carriers, location technology vendors and other stakeholders will have a significantly better understanding of how much time network-based carriers will need.” Along with GPS tracking, the FCC is also in the works to require emergency response teams to accept text messages, videos and photos from mobile phones in the event of an emergency.

Article Written by Marisa O’Connor