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An 18-month old toddler in Calgary, Canada, died after it took two ambulances 40 minutes to get to him thanks to one ambulance being dispatched to the wrong city as the VOIP phone used to make the 911 call gave emergency services the wrong idea as to the location of the caller.
Elijah Luck went into medical distress and his family made an emergency call for an ambulance. However thanks to the “nomadic” VOIP service they were using the emergency services were shown the wrong address information and dispatched an ambulance in Mississauga, Ontario, more than twenty-five-hundred miles away.
After waiting a half an hour for the ambulance the parents rang again from a landline and an ambulance arrived six minutes later, though the baby was pronounced dead upon reaching the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
Fixed landlines and VOIP services automatically route an emergency call to the nearest call centre. Nomadic VOIP services however do not always give the correct information and so, as in this case, the call can be routed to the wrong call centre and the emergency operator can be given the wrong address information. This is why many VOIP services, such as Skype, specifically give the disclaimer that they are not to be used for emergency calls.
The Canadian authorities are now looking at better ways to deal with nomadic VOIP services alongside making consumers more aware of the limitations of the service in an emergency context.
I was not aware of the Nomadic VOIP worked in such manner, awful someone parent(s) had to find out the hard way, i dont think i will be calling the emergency services on one in future should i need them.
Point is do not use techno…………………When the regular phone was called the ambulance arrived within six minutes:
Mourners gathered Monday afternoon at a Calgary church for the funeral of 18-month-old Elijah Luck, who died last week during a faulty 911 dispatch.
About 250 people attended the tear-filled service at the Royal Oak Victory Church in the city’s northwest.
Rev. Dave Meyers said while Elijah only lived for about 540 days, he left behind powerful messages of endurance, for overcoming medical difficulties after being born two months premature, and joy. He said Elijah brightened the lives of everyone he met.
Elijah was found unconscious and not breathing last Tuesday night. A family member tried to call 911 using the home’s voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) phone service, but the service provider, Comwave, did not patch the call through to Calgary’s emergency centre.
Instead, an ambulance was dispatched to the Luck family’s former home in Mississauga, Ont., the last address the company had on file. The family said they waited for more than half an hour before they used a neighbour’s land line to call 911 again, and an ambulance arrived less than six minutes later. Elijah Luck died at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
@anita Gofradump wrote:
An 18-month old toddler in Calgary, Canada, died after it took two ambulances 40 minutes to get to him thanks to one ambulance being dispatched to the wrong city as the VOIP phone used to make the 911 call gave emergency services the wrong idea as to the location of the caller.
Elijah Luck went into medical distress and his family made an emergency call for an ambulance. However thanks to the “nomadic” VOIP service they were using the emergency services were shown the wrong address information and dispatched an ambulance in Mississauga, Ontario, more than twenty-five-hundred miles away.
After waiting a half an hour for the ambulance the parents rang again from a landline and an ambulance arrived six minutes later, though the baby was pronounced dead upon reaching the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
Fixed landlines and VOIP services automatically route an emergency call to the nearest call centre. Nomadic VOIP services however do not always give the correct information and so, as in this case, the call can be routed to the wrong call centre and the emergency operator can be given the wrong address information. This is why many VOIP services, such as Skype, specifically give the disclaimer that they are not to be used for emergency calls.
The Canadian authorities are now looking at better ways to deal with nomadic VOIP services alongside making consumers more aware of the limitations of the service in an emergency context.
I was not aware of the Nomadic VOIP worked in such manner, awful someone parent(s) had to find out the hard way, i dont think i will be calling the emergency services on one in future should i need them.
who will you call then ? batman ? ghost busters perhaps ?
I was thinking of calling 118 118, maybe I will get MR T turn up in a tank and say ” quit yo jibba jabba fool, you aint dead…hurrr! ”
This is a really sad post
From a techincal point of view (to put Lil Fek’s mind at ease)- Nomadic Voip is not used in the UK- only CLI data from landlines ie your address appears as soon as you make a 999 call (which still has to be confirmed with the caller) is used and variant geo locational identifiers for mobile phones (ie you can be geo located within 20 metres of where you are on a mobile)
As tragic as this is – on most voip call software/phones, it does say “do not use for emergency calls”
Perhaps the techies who create the system could bar emergency calls altogether, or divert them somewhere else
Problem is though, when you use VOIP and get rid of your main line carrier (e.g. BT) then the system falls down.
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