The Federal Communications Commission has adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing new enhanced 911 (E911) vertical location accuracy requirements for multi-story building environments. The Commission proposed a “z-axis” vertical location accuracy metric of plus or minus three meters relative to the wireless handset for 80% of indoor wireless 911 calls. The Commission tentatively concluded that the three meter metric would be sufficiently accurate to identify the caller’s floor level “in most cases” and would be technically feasible under the timeframes established in the FCC’s E911 rules.
