During the current disastrous fire in the state of California, there have been repeated mention of Reverse 911® calls made by the emergency agencies warning the residents of approaching wildfire. These are directed calls to residents living in the affected areas. Even though I am supposed to be working in the telecom field, I have never heard of this service. But come to think of it, I have received a couple of such calls from my local gentrified municipality because they spotted a coyote in the backyard of a neighbor’s house.
So naturally, I googled that term to find out that this service has been in use for quite some time and that the term is a registered trademark, I presume owned by Sigma Communications. Reverse 911® refers to a community notification system used by many organizations. It is used for targeted notification of local emergency. It uses landlines for notification. This is a critical point, because cell phone and VoIP lines are not notified. Here is another instance where giving up landline has unrecognized drawback. Only recently, Homeland Security Administration is allowing San Diego residents to register their cell phone and VoIP numbers to the database. I think the IP Communications industry should work on expanding the notification system to other forms of communications as well, not just cell phones and VoIP.
When I received such notification calls before, the Caller ID box will give the name of the local municipality; but otherwise there is no indication that it is an emergency notification call. I feel that the ringing tone must be significantly different to indicate as such and the caller ID should also contain this information so that any automatic call processing can be disabled.
Posted by aswath at October 27, 2007 01:47 PM