Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

I assume GP envisioned some magic where it doesn't actually go to a human operator, it just somehow does a handshake with the 911 department's equipment instead.

Still not a good idea, since you don't want a bunch of phones DDoSing 911.

> it just somehow does a handshake with the 911 department's equipment instead.

> 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.

>Still not a good idea, since you don't want a bunch of phones DDoSing 911.

Not sure I entirely agree. I would want an emergency system to be resilient to DDoS, and frequently tested for that.

I've only had to call once. Live operator, and somehow already knew exactly what I was calling for! (It had literally just happened, too, so I knew exactly how quick they'd gotten their info together. That, or I got the same operator that got someone else's call.)

(I agree that having them handle tests might overwhelm the system. Still, it would be comforting to have the ability to test.)

In Europe we had a different number for the tests when 112 was first introduced. 113 it was I think. With the same kind of routing but not going to a real person.

The number has been taken out of service but something like this could be put back.

Not Europe, your country in Europe.

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've called 911 before. The other end picked up instantly. It was a shock how fast they answered. I gave my location (cross streets) and the police were there in less than 30 seconds. Pretty impressive.

(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.)

Roughly where do you live? It's always been a near-instant live pickup.

This is not an issue I have ever had. Ever. I use to call 911 quite frequently, as well as part of my job duties (I worked in a group home with individuals who had developmental disabilities and were quite violent). I'm sorry to hear about your situation, but this should most definitely not be happening. Pick-up should be instantaneous.

I was more thinking that there should be a system for making dry run calls, such that no human actually has to be involved, and that phones should be required to exercise that system on a regular basis, so that edge cases that weren't caught in automated testing will eventually be caught.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com