Sprint joins e911 laggards

1 Aug 2001 at 09:19 GMT Sinead Carew

Sprint Corp's Sprint PCS unit has become the latest US telco to warn the Federal Communications Commission that it will be unable to keep to its October 1 deadline for the implementation of Phase II e911 location-detection technology. It blamed technology availability, as well its own installation of a next-generation mobile network.

Sprint PCS, which is the mobile business of Kansas City, Missouri-based Sprint, said that network equipment vendor Nortel Networks Corp is "particularly far behind in its effort" to provide e911-compliant switching software.

The operator, which has chosen to implement a location system based on a combination of network and handset-based GPS technology, also noted that its plans to implement next-generation cdma2000 1XRTT technology will also limit the number of GPS handsets it can deploy.

Sprint said that because the GPS handsets are based on Qualcomm chips, they will not support 1XRTT, and this will delay the volume of handset sales to its users. Sprint did not say when it expects GPS-enabled 1xRTT handsets. However, since the operator only began its roll-out of 1xRTT this year, it seems unlikely that enough consumers will be using 1xRTT to make a huge dent in the possible GPS handset user base.

While Sprint seems happier with the availability of its other main network vendor Lucent Technologies Inc, it said it only expects to be able to roll out e911 in one Lucent market by October 1. The operator expects to have completed its Lucent markets in 2002.

Because Sprint is still waiting to begin testing the Nortel equipment, it would not give an estimated completion time for its upgrade in Nortel markets. The operator hopes to begin the roll-out of Nortel's e911 technology at the beginning of next year. Sprint expects to begin selling some GPS handsets by October 1 and expects 100 percent of its new handset sales to be GPS-enabled by the end of next year.

Sprint joins the leading US operators Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Nextel Communications in its request for a waiver of the deadline. Another large operator VoiceStream has already been granted a waiver.

The next big question is how the FCC will cope with all of these waiver requests. The regulator will find it difficult to force a technology upgrade if availability is a real issue, and is faced with two choices. It can either comb through these applications and spend a long time examining each carrier separately, or it can make a blanket change to its deadline.

The latter option would take less time, but it would be unlikely to impress public safety organizations, which are suspicious that the carriers could be using the general confusion as an excuse to delay their own roll-outs. However, considering that the regulator's review of outstanding waiver requests is taking so long, the deadline is likely to pass by unnoticed anyway.