Every phone should be required to make some sort of dry-run 911 call on a regular basis to make sure it works.
Have you tried to call 911 recently? I have. Both times, I had to wait on hold over five minutes for someone to answer. "Press 1 if you need police. Press 2 for fire. Press 3 for a medical emergency. Press 4 if this is a non-emergency and you will be transferred to 311." After that there's not even hold music to let you know you haven't been disconnected.
There are almost 300 million cell phones in America. Who's going to answer those test calls? The operators who are already too busy to answer emergency calls?
Still not a good idea, since you don't want a bunch of phones DDoSing 911.
> Still not a good idea, since you don't want a bunch of phones DDoSing 911.
Eh, it doesn't sound too bad as something to roll out eventually. About 240 million 911 calls per year vs. 280 million cellphones in the US, and a dry run test would be expected to use a fraction of the resources (short call, etc). So, to test once per year I'd think you'd need to make the call handling infrastructure a small percent wider, and that extra capacity is something you could even benefit from (because phones could avoid testing at peak times).
The big problem is that this tests the actual call handling (and perhaps address reporting, etc)-- but doesn't do much to test the actual UI, audio path, etc, under the circumstance of an emergency call.
Not sure I entirely agree. I would want an emergency system to be resilient to DDoS, and frequently tested for that.
The number has been taken out of service but something like this could be put back.
In Italy (still in the transition phase) we have historically:
113 Police
112 Carabinieri (transitioning to unique emergency numbers)
The police won't be happy about your tests on 113, a few other countries have 113 for police:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...
(I agree that having them handle tests might overwhelm the system. Still, it would be comforting to have the ability to test.)
(The incident I called in was... I was looking at my window and saw this bus unloading. The passengers formed a big group and started pushing each other into traffic. After seeing a couple of cars swerve and narrowly avoid the innocent victim, I thought it was time for governmental intervention. The police arrived, ushered everyone onto the sidewalk, and that was that.)