Regulator will force cellphone companies to adopt GPS tracking system
This site was under the impression that handset locations could be tracked based only on the signal strength received at the cellular towers – by triangulation. Perhaps that’s set up only in other jusridictions, but in any case the surveillance state plows ahead – for your safety and security, of course. Update: The Globe and Mail’s article on this mentions the triangulation method: it only works well in urban centres.
CBC News
January 7, 2009
Canada’s phone and broadcast regulator will force cellphone companies to change their systems so dispatchers can locate the origin of a 911 call, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
“We are concerned about the safety and security of Canadians,” Paul Godin, director of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), told the Globe and Mail. The decision was made by CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein, Godin said.
The agency will make a formal decision in February and is expected to give the cellphone companies until February 2010 to get the equipment so 911 dispatchers can find the origin of a cellphone call.
A number of people have died after making 911 calls from cellphones because emergency dispatchers could not tell where the person was. That has happened in cases where people moved and their address was not updated, or where they were in remote locations.
For example, Sharmarke Warsame died outside Brooks, Alta., last fall after calling 911. He had been beaten and left in a field. Police found his body three days after the call was made.
About half of all 911 calls are made from cellphones, the newspaper said.
The necessary technology has been around for some years, but the regulator has refused to require phone companies to install it, the Globe said.
Cellphone companies can charge a 911 fee, even in areas where there is no such service provided.
The big three cellphone companies — Bell, Telus and Rogers — as well as local providers are facing class-action lawsuits over the 911 charge. The lawsuits claim the companies misrepresented to customers what the charge was for.
Bell Mobility recently failed to get a Yellowknife man’s case over the fees thrown out of court.
Contractor James Anderson filed the lawsuit in 2007, saying that he took exception to being charged 75 cents a month for 911 service, when there is no 911 service in the Northwest Territories.
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