NENA Approves i2 VoIP Architecture for E911

The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) board of directors has approved the NENA Interim VoIP Architecture for Enhanced 911 Services, known as i2.

This is NENA’s first major standard on the VoIP and enhanced 911 (E911) system interface.

The i2 standard is regarded as an interim system enabling VoIP service providers to deliver E911 service through the current E911 infrastructure. It is the first of a two-part major redesign effort started in 2003 to bring the E911 system into the IP world. The standard can be viewed and downloaded through the NENA Web site at www.nena.org.

The deployment of the new standard already has begun, said Roger Hixson, technical issues director at NENA. “Some of the third-party vendors, such as Intrado (Inc.) are doing some of the functions privately as part of their service offering,” he said, “but in terms of a national open architecture, there are certain national functions that need to be put in place, such as authentication capability to make it possible for any VoIP provider to identify where they need to go to get certain data, particularly around address validation and call routing.”

The FCC has not yet addressed developing such a database, but an E911 bill working its way though the Senate mandates the agency appoint a national routing-code administrator who would be in charge of developing and maintaining such a database.

NENA is developing a database of such information for use by any service provider.

Intrado Inc. www.intrado.com
FCC www.fcc.gov
National Emergency Number Association (NENA) www.nena.org