90% of 911 calls in Washington, DC lack accurate location info
22 Jul 2014 • engadget.comAccording to Find Me 911, carriers typically able to offer “Phase I’ data, which covers a phone number and the location of the base station transmitting the call. ‘Phase I’I data, meanwhile, includes latitude and longitude coordinates, accurate to between 50 and 300 meters. According to the data, Verizon and Sprint offered this detailed information on 24.6 percent and 23.3 percent of emergency calls. However, T-Mobile included this location data on a dire 3.2 percent of emergency calls. Worse still, AT&T only did so on 2.6 percent of calls made.
If you like to plan for the worst sounds like T-Mobile and AT&T aren’t the right carrier for you. Seems like it would be easy enough for a (modern) phone to always store your last GPS location and then just send that down the wire when you made an emergency call.