ELI5, How does calling the emergency line connect you to the nearest PD?
In: 3
Depends on what kind of phone. For traditional landlines, your phone number was inextricably linked to your physical location, so it was easy to work with local departments and route calls to the appropriate department.
I used to work in 911 provisioning for a VOIP provider, since those phones are not permanently linked to your location but was likely linked to your house (and might be a number corresponding to a different area), we had to have the customer self-report their address, then we would work with local 911 centers to confirm their calls were going to the correct place. This was often challenging in rural areas, where people had Rural Route addresses for mail delivery and didn’t have house numbers or even live on named roads. Once I had to figure out what to do with a guy whose house was in one town, but the street his house was on was actually in the next town over and neither town wanted to take responsibility for his 911 calls.
Latest Answers