Comment by exabrial
2 years ago
When I had a Pixel4, I witnessed a car accident in which someone got hurt quite substantially.
Hard as a tried, the process of dialing 911 failed multiple times; the phone app simply crashed and left me with a blank screen or the home screen. I put a complaint in with my carrier but nothing was ever done. And of course Google could give 0 fucks with their customer support.
A few months later, I needed to call 911 for an emergency and it did work, but yeah... we got "Eventual Consistency" for an emergency.
Someone could put all of these reports together along with the paper trail of unresolved complaints to Google through discovery and likely end up with a great class action case or even a criminal negligence case.
911 is one of those things that absolutely must work and most phones will allow you through using any available network if you are out of range of your primary carrier.
The fact that this is unreliable on any mobile phone is completely unacceptable.
911 obviously doesn't have to work given the blatant disregard Google has had for 911 performance over multiple phone generations. I consistently had 911 calls fail on my Pixel 6, which led me to get rid of that device.
Some Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) also give zero shits about call answer time, NG911, 911 via text, or even consistently working E911.
E911 provides a static address to the public safety answering point when a 911 call comes in. NG911 enriches this with more accurate latitude longitude and height above ground level data, or for phones that are in a fixed location a room number or extension number can be provided to make it much easier for a routing emergency services.
We need a national system for 911, not this mishmash of 10 to 30-year-old proprietary systems serving the 5700 PSAPs put together for each department on a township, city or county basis, with minimal coordination across regions and states.
> 911 obviously doesn't have to work given the blatant disregard Google has had
Revoking all of their FCC approvals will fix this problem, and right quick.
Use of the PCS cellular spectrum is conditioned on several things; spectrum purchase by a carrier is necessary but not sufficient. Correctly-functioning emergency calling is one of the other conditions.
> A few months later
I’m surprised you kept the phone. I would have gotten a new phone if I discovered my current one couldn’t dial 911 properly.
Well, how many times in your life do you call 911? I am in my forties and I maybe used my local equivalent 3 times and in every occurence someone else could have made the call.
And I've only used my mobile phone since my late 20's, it is not like I buy smartphones for emergency purposes.
you only need it to fail once…
> it is not like I buy smartphones for emergency purposes
How strange. That's the main reason I expect most people (especially on HN) would own a mobile phone at all. The ability to be contactable/make contact in an emergency is the greatest value it holds, surely?
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My colleague once told me that the reason telecom providers took so long with Android software updates was because they had to verify that the phone meets regulatory requirements after the update. One of these requirements was being able to dial 112 (Europe's 911) very thoroughly. There was a legally prescribed process (by BNetzA, IIRC) for doing that in Germany. After a quick Google search, it seems like there is something like that mandated by the FCC in the US.
I wonder how the Pixel 4 passed it. Not just in the US, but in many countries.
The Pixel 4 probably reliably called 911 on the simplest network config, like GSM or CDMA, but when encountering WCDMA, VoLTE and all the fun ways you can configure these technologies, you ended up with situations where the phone would perhaps have data service, but no ability to dial 911.
T-Mobile has had manufacturers brick band 12 on phones like the Moto E because you would get rural data coverage with this band, but T-Mobile did not sell any Moto phones and did not want to write a software config for VoLTE for Motorola phones. Without band 12 enabled the phone will happily roam onto AT&T or Verizon in areas where T-Mobile doesn't offer GSM service instead of hanging out on a cellular network that can never provide calling or texting at that location.
> 112 (Europe's 911)
Small point, but many (most?) countries support 112, and it's definitely worth knowing as "911" likely won't work outside of the US.
Dialing 911 in the EU can redirect you to 112, though I don't know how that redirection works. It's worth knowing the local emergency numbers in any case
Send a complaint to the FCC. The carrier will notice.
Software is a mess.
You're down-voted because you kinda stopped short, but I think it's worth discussing: Many engineering disciplines deal with safety-critical stuff and often have robust process around validation of design and implementation as a result. There's heaps of non-safety-critical software written, and if the same processes, attitudes, and even personell, are applied to a safety-critical component of a generally non-safety-critical system (like mobile 911) then we get bugs like this that canget people killed. How does our field improve on this?
It will get mature like any other industry, however I cannot see how that happens before another century or two. The field's unfulfilled potential is just too big.
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