E911 Emergency Call Alerts

Do headlines about Kari's Law E911 requirements have you confused or concerned?

If you are running a Cisco Unified Communications Manager platform, here is what you need to know and how Call Record Analyzer can help.

Let's start by taking a step back and talking about the recent history of E911 in the USA. Over the past 10-20 years, requirements for emergency calling from a Multi-Line Telephone System have been loosely regulated and mostly on a state-by-state basis. Just over 20 states had legislation outlining specific requirements for providing notifications or specific location information from an MLTS.

Since the advent of the MLTS and centralized trunking, providing consistent emergency calling has been a challenge. Now with the pervasiveness of VOIP, providing consistency with emergency calling has only become more challenging. In August 2019, the FCC adopted what has become known as Kari's Law to address many of these challenges at a national level.

Kari's Law is named after a mother who was attacked in her hotel room and passed away as a result of her injuries. Her young daughter was present and attempted to dial 9-1-1 from the hotel room phone several times, unaware that the MTLS required a prefix of 9 to access an outside line.

As such, Kari's Law has two main requirements:

• Ability to dial "9-1-1" directly to access emergency services
• Upon a 911 call being placed, the system MUST provide notification to designated personnel, such as front desk/security/etc.

• The first requirement of dialing 9-1-1 directly can be addressed via dial plan configuration. Please verify and test configurations going forward to ensure compliance.
• The second requirement around notifications is not something built into CUCM natively today. For larger enterprises, Cisco Emergency Responder is an add-on application that can provide notification and location tracking for multi-story buildings. In some environments, Emergency Responder can add more complexity or be cost-prohibitive. This is where Call Record Analyzer comes in...

Call Record Analyzer (CRA) is a cloud-based platform that offers real-time notifications when a 911 call is placed. These alerts can be delivered via E-mail and CRA web interface dashboard notification. Locations can be defined in CRA to notify specific destinations for each physical location where users are located. When a 911 call is placed, the alert destinations will receive a message that 911 was called, along with the internal caller's information, so that they can be prepared to receive emergency personnel.

Below is a sample of the notification configuration dialogue

From a deployment standpoint, all that is required is outbound https access from CUCM to the CRA Cloud making the deployment quick and painless. If you need to provide 911 notifications to meet Kari's Law requirements, Call Record Analyzer is the most time-efficient and cost-effective solution to provide these capabilities. CRA also provides a multitude of other features such as Call Analytics, Voice Quality Troubleshooting, and Call Blocking.