Can emergency personnel locate me through my cellphone?

Editor’s note: For information about how this reporting came to fruition, read the backstory here. 

As more people have shifted to cellphones instead of landlines, the country’s emergency operations systems have had to find ways to locate people who are making 911 calls on their cellphones indoors.

According to the National Chamber of Commerce, seven in 10 adults are wireless-only phone users, which is about 183 million Americans nationwide.

Marion County residents are no different; An overwhelming majority of people here have transitioned to relying only on cellphones. But with so much rural area to cover with cell towers, meandering city lines, county enclaves, and two 911 call centers, getting a precise location for a caller can be a challenge.

In Marion County, the location data from cellphone callers gives a person’s location “usually within 100 feet,” the “Gazette” learned after observing numerous 911 calls over a combined 30 hours at the two dispatch centers operated by the city of Ocala and Marion County.

While 100 feet is reasonably close, there are plenty of scenarios where better accuracy, the kind provided by landlines, would be preferred. The accuracy of the location depends on the cell carrier and a host of other elements.

Calling from a landline is still the best way for a 911 operator to determine your location, according to Marion County’s 911 Management Director Michell Hirst.

“Where a [cell] call routes to and the accuracy provided with the call can change based on a number of factors. You may not always connect with the same tower and weather conditions can decrease the accuracy of the location provided with the call,” she wrote in an email.

With landline phone service, it’s easy to determine where your call will route to based on your address – homes within the city limits route to OPD, and homes outside of the city limits route to PSC[Marion County Public Safety Center], Hirst explained.

When asked if she felt one cellphone carrier was stronger than another in Marion County, Hirst replied, “As for the carriers, I’m not aware of which one would be the optimum choice – that seems to fluctuate – the carriers are continuously adjusting their networks and adding towers.”

In 2020, the AARP published an article weighing all the factors involved in making the switch from cell to landline. “In an emergency, a good old-fashioned landline phone has been regarded as the most reliable method of communication,’’ the author wrote. “When storms knock out power, cellphone towers often go dark, as do high-speed internet connections.”

The AARP has advocated for policies that make sure “citizens understand the limitations of technology. Policymakers and regulators should ensure that wireless carriers make wireless E911 technology available as soon as possible in areas where it does not yet exist. Consumers must have clear and accurate information about service providers’ E911 performance in their local community. Policymakers should require Voice over Internet Protocol service [VoIP] service providers to supply telephone customers with sufficient battery backup to permit customers to contact E911 during a power outage.”

The Federal Trade Commission, in connection with the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau implemented a plan to assist nationwide providers in collecting, formatting, and submitting aggregate live 911 call data to increase meeting the 911 location accuracy benchmarks. The 10-year timeline, which started in 2016 following this report, required significant investment by government operating call centers and cellphone carriers to increase capacity, and security. That federal action timeline is now in its eighth year.

There are two emergency communication centers in Marion County. A 911 call is triangulated to either the city’s or county’s 911 center based on the cellphone tower closest to the caller rather than jurisdictional boundaries.

There are other considerations. If a person makes a 911 call from a cellphone as they are driving and they enter and exit Ocala’s city limits, that call might be routed to the county’s 911 center. This could result in a slower response time as a county dispatcher must alert their Ocala counterpart of the emergency. Ocala’s significant amount of annexing in recent years has left several county enclaves where callers are likely going to ring to the city, even though they are in the county.

How are you supposed to know which tower or call center is receiving your 911 call?

One way is to schedule a test call using the non-emergency phone line at the communications center to see what communication center your phone rings to. Different jurisdictions, however, handle these requests differently.

At 911.gov, F&Q page includes the question: “How do I place a “test” call to make sure 911 works for me?”

It recommended identifying your local call center using this website: nasna911.org/home and calling its nonemergency number to schedule a test.

“Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its nonemergency phone number,” the site reads.

“Test calls may need to be scheduled and are usually based on the workload experienced” at the 911 center.

When the “Gazette” called neighboring Alachua County and Citrus County emergency communication centers and asked about their policy on citizens testing where a call was routed to, officials in both counties invited us to hang up and do a test 911 call at that very moment because they weren’t busy.

However, in Marion County the long-standing practice of scheduling of a test call by a citizen has recently been prohibited by law enforcement.

When evaluating the practical implications of locating a cell phone caller, this “Gazette” reporter realized that living on a flag lot in the county that abutted the city line might cause some challenges for first responders locating her in an emergency from a cell phone call for help- so arrangements were made for a test call during a time that is usually not busy.

The county approved the test, but before the reporter could make the call, the sheriff and Ocala Police Department threatened to arrest the reporter.

Hirst explained, however, that testing a cell phone one day doesn’t guarantee it will be the same accuracy the next day due to a constant fluctuation of carrier changes to towers as well as weather.

Theoretically, if there were a local consolidation of 911 communication systems of the city and county, as encouraged by the federal government in 2016, fewer people would be affected by the atmospheric changes and carrier shifts because more people would call to one central location.