Dash911 911 Service

August 8, 2005

Dash911 will soon be rolling out nationwide (e)911 for VoIP, designed for small VoIP providers. According to Dask911, "incorporating E911 into your VoIP offering can be difficult and expensive if you aren't a CLEC or ILEC. Signing up with a national 911 provider can incur large upfront costs, custom programming, additional equipment and high monthly minimums that smaller VoIP providers simply can't afford. Complex regulations, changing technologies and interoperability with the thousands of PSAPs can make it almost impossible for you to offer 911 service." Using Dash911, smaller VoIP player can have affordable 911 service.

In addition, they will offer a provisioning API (SOAP-based), so that you can integrate E911 configuration right into your administrative system. According to Dash911:

"After an end-user is provisioned, E911 call-routing can be performed for that DID. Your softswitch only needs route 911 calls to a 10-digit number we will provide to you, as well as set the ANI to the telephone number of your subscriber. Our gateway will receive the call and perform the lookup for final call routing (SIP interconnects, PSTN redirects, etc.). The Dash911 PSTN gateway will receive the call, read the caller ID, and direct the call to the correct PSAP, along with ALI information if possible."

Some highlights of their 911 service include:

Low up front costs.
No high monthly commitments.
24x7 Call Center
Low monthly cost, low minimums

Their 24x7 call center I mentioned is a novel idea. Their "automatic" 911 service is backed up by their "manual" 24x7 emergency call center for manual routing of emergency calls over the VoIP network. A VoIP call that can not automatically locate the appropriate PSAP based upon the caller’s telephone number and address will be redirected to the Manual Emergency Call Relay Center for real-time human interaction with the calling party. Not as fast as automatic 911 routing for sure, but this is a nice "value add" for VoIP providers that can be used to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Dash911 gets their backbone from Intrado, then they wrap it with other software and services, such as IVR, and their 24x7 call center.