Of course, the problem with 911 is the problem of location of the originating handset. That much has been clear for years. Getting that information to the 911 call center is the problem; it's pretty much worthless info even if you have it inside the PBX - you could just as easily have an external database that maps extensions to locations - why bother with the PBX if there is no in-band signalling to the PSAP?
This makes me think a bit about some other 911 ideas I had a while back, using lat/lon/altitude. Can ADSI tones be transmitted through "any" phone call on the PSTN? It might be interesting for PBX systems to pass across the lat/lon/altitude of callers via ADSI in-band. This will never work, of course, since nobody would trust the transmitters. The 911 question almost instantly spins into a political issue, and not a technical issue, since there are a number of clever ways to solve the problem but not a number of clever ways to bang solutions into people's heads.
Bumping calls to clear a path for 911 is possible within Asterisk already - see the "SoftHangup" application.
JT
Problem: 911 calls placed through Asterisk are associated with the physical location of where the CO trunks terminate. This is not really a problem when all extensions are located in the same building, but when Asterisk is used in a campus-like or otherwise networked environment, it can get messy.
A common solution is to install a few analog lines at each location, for emergency calls only. But by making clever use of Caller ID (and adding a 'location' field to extensions.conf), it should be possible to properly identify the location of the caller:
exten => 1001,1,John Doe,1223 Bell Ave. Room 51
For this to work, you would have to be able to apply rules to the 911 context in a dial plan, to replace the *name* portion with the *location* portion.
A similar rule could be defined to drop other calls if 911 is dialed and all lines are busy (e.g. drop the lobby phone but not the front desk, or drop local vs. long distance, caller ID calls vs. non-identified calls, etc.).
Getting lengthy, better stop.
Dylan.
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