Kari's Law - Direct access to 911 required by Feb. 16, 2020 - Anyone Implemented this yet?

[Timothy Balk]

So fresh off of Enterprise Connect our telephony people have brought up the topic of Kari's Law - https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/582/text - Our team was curious if anyone has this implemented with their instance of Skype for Business with Enterprise Voice? We're looking to gather up any best practices and lessons learned to help us in the implementation with this in our environment. Did you spend a lot of time educating your end users about this change and what the potential downstream effects would be? Did you work with local dispatchers to ease into the transition? Posted the topic in Microsoft Teams Discussions as well to get input.

Thanks!

[#2]

Hi,

Kari's Law Act requires you to setup your PBX so that users can dial 911 without any prefix, so previously some PBXs were setup so that you had to dial 9 to get out to PSTN so a call to 9+911. With Teams and Skype you use Dial plans to configure this, that is no problem. If you came from an old system required you to prefix calls with a digit you should also allow that in your Skype environment, so that both 9+911 and 911 is allowed.

[#3]

Right, the how is not too bad - we are on the preparation side of things... how much communication, do we need to talk to some of the local emergency dispatchers? That kind of stuff.

[#4]

@Timothy BalkYou actually need to spend a good amount of time understanding how the 911 laws pertain to your company in the locations where you have sites. Even outside of federal standards, many local jurisdictions have specific requirements around 911. Specifically, the verbiage of the rule is such that it can be widely open to legal interpretation that may require a more complex architecture even for basic deployments. Keeping that in mind, network operations processes may require a change since they may become a liability.

I spent an awful lot of time working on this in Texas and there are interesting caveats here based on the way the law was written. If you are at all going to have a conversation about Emergency Services, be sure to engage your Health and Safety, Compliance, and Legal teams before determining what the solution will look like.

[#5]

@Joel KeeneSo... I understood that "somehow" the location address in "emergency locations" at the Skype for Business Admin Center would be passed to a 911 call center for location assistance.  Naïve, I know. 

How does it actually work?

Thanks, Gary

[#6]

@Gary Bauer Users have to be set to one of these locations that you have set in Skype for Business Admin Center in order for the location to be sent along to the PSAP... the location is sent along as metadata with the SIP info (PSAP consumes the location info and routes to an appropriate local dispatcher). So if you do a network trace (have not done this myself) when doing this - pretty sure you would be able to see that data with the transmit.

At least that's my understanding of how it works.

[#7]

@Gary BauerCorrect...there are a number of ways to route numbers to the correct PSAP where you can leverage Location Information Service and Network Config in SfB. The "latest/greatest" method is using a e911 provider which allow you to build trunks specifically for 911 calls and they would get the right information to the right PSAP. That's a good chunk of change from the bank usually.

Alternatively, if your corporate networks are well-managed, you can work with your carrier to mimic something like the same function but leveraging LIS and doing some number translation or specific PSAP call destination to get the same sort of function. Keep in mind in these scenarios, you are not technically passing along location information data as much as you are either dialing numbers so that carrier MSAGs get populated or you are dialing the PSAP directly. In these cases, the onus for the call getting to the right PSAP is on the business/company and not the carrier. They will certainly coordinate and work with their customers to make sure MSAGs get appropriately populated, but those processes take time and require diligent and regular testing.