Comment by denysvitali
2 years ago
Yes, I think the real problem is #2.
The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911.
Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely don't have a way to automatically test these changes - or they might happen as part of other "features" (remember the Microsoft Teams bug that caused similar issues?).
In the end, the smarter our smartphones become - the dumber they are at doing the one single thing they were initially meant to do - get help in case of an emergency.
> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer.
And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.
A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments.
Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.
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If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
Linus Tech Tips has one complete with an isolated private 5G network inside. I’m sure Google could manage.
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Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure.
To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy.
Even the dimmest view of management should expect them to care about extremely bad PR.
So how do you explain Unity and Reddit and Twitter and Wizards of the Coast all belly flopping their PR this year? I'm sure they care, in some abstract sense, about PR (well, not Musk). I just think they're out of touch and incompetent at dealing with it. Some of them are even on the record saying it will blow over and the benefits of not caring are worth the cost, like the Reddit CEO. Clearly the costs of bad PR aren't high enough.
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> the only way to test is... to call 911
You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...
Completely tangential to testing that the service connects: I have a young child and we've done practice "what do you do in an emergency" things, but are there any "fake 911" type services where a young child can call to practice a 911 call, so they can experience how the operator will talk to them, so in a real emergency it would be a bit less jarring?
Is that only a service that Bandwidth.com offers or would it work on a regular cell network?
I think it depends on the carrier you use, but a lot of other carriers support it.
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I've been wondering how to test this, thank you
Okay, but that's not going through the same paths of a 911 call, is it?
And by that I mean the emergency mode of the modems
You don't need a full concert hall to test 911, the simplest LTE test equipment can be just couple sandwiches big. They're also not expensive at Google scale. It does concern me that there were anecdotal posts that read to me like that, developing firmwares and not blatantly violating basic assumptions and principles and core premises of Google MDM cannot occur simultaneously. If I somehow had to, I would bet that that to be on the path to the root cause. I mean, a lot of software jockeys have to be explained that IP address isn't assigned to a CPU socket.
You need a special room as well - you can't accept that someone near your building might end up having his 911 call routed through your test infrastructure.
Alternatively, I think you can somehow connect the device antenna to your equipment, so that the signal doesn't even have to be transmitted over the air (or at the scale of a femtocell). Still, rather "expensive" to setup in multiple locations for just a team that develops a dialer.
Additionally, you'd have to test this across multiple OS versions, and devices. Still doable, but most likely not incentivized by the managers at Google
I don't see why it would be expensive, for no other than Google, to set up a microwave oven with a factory rooted phone and a femtocell inside on ~dozen locations worldwide. There's no special legal or financial complexities in doing that.
And selling phones that can't pass certification is just irresponsible. If you can't make a product work, you're free to be responsible and cancel a product. It's on Google to do businesses legally.
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Can't you stand up your own test network for that? Other phones won't connect to that, so you don't need to fully rf isolate, as long as you have some trust in the test network not doing crazy things. It's well over a decade ago, in Europe, and I was only very peripherally involved, but it didn't seem that hard to get permits for such a test network indoors.
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I believe some places you provide emergency services the number you will be calling from to test, so they can handle it appropriately.
Ultimately with a system like 911, you will always have to do final testing on the real deal. Because this is just too serious to get wrong.
How does every other phone manufacturer do it then?