911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate. There are thousands of (poorly run, uncoordinated) Public Safety Answering Points across the country, and most tend to contract with just the local incumbent telecom, ensuring any time there is an issue with said incumbent, every call to said PSAP fails.
In the context of most of these PSAPs having already moved to VOIP, there isn't a coherent reason why these calls shouldn't go straight from the carrier originating the call to the PSAP, without middlemen like Centurylink standing by to misroute those calls.
I mean if you want to get into the history of any technology you can point out how archaic and horrible it was initially. We're still in that phase with the internet, in 50 years people are going to read about things TCP/IP and Facebook and Comcast and won't be able to stop laughing hysterically at how bad and flimsy it all was.
> 911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate.
I'm always interested in Chicago history, so I went looking, but couldn't find anything at, for example, https://www.nena.org/page/911overviewfacts . Do you know anywhere this history is written up?
In the context of most of these PSAPs having already moved to VOIP, there isn't a coherent reason why these calls shouldn't go straight from the carrier originating the call to the PSAP, without middlemen like Centurylink standing by to misroute those calls.