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Caller ID for Emergency Calls didn't work for me

Posted by matthewmalk248 on Tue, 09/05/2017

Hey gang, I have an MTE tenant that just called 911 from their extension and I got hit with a $250 Rogue-911 fee from my carrier so I'm confused on why this feature didn't work like I thought it would.

Each extension has their own DID and I have "Use DID as Caller ID" checked, but then i also have "Caller ID for Emergency Calls" filled in with the tenant's main DID that is registered with e911. The call shows that the extensions personal DID was used with they called 911.

Trunk Override for Emergency Calls I left as "None" as the normal trunk is fine.

What did I miss?


Submitted by netriplex on Tue, 09/05/2017 Permalink

The emergency caller id number is only used for outbound routes that have the type "emergency" as far as I am aware.

So, you can use the same trunk for the 911 call, but you need to make sure that you create a separate dialing pattern for 911 that is marked as emergency.

The reason for this is international compatibility. 911 exists in the US (and probably is the same in some other places), but in Europe "911" is "112", so the system administrator needs to properly mark which dialing pattern(s) are the emergency patterns.

Submitted by matthewmalk248 on Tue, 09/05/2017 Permalink

Ah thank you netriplex, you found my mistake! I left all the default (example) outbound routes from the "thirdlane" tenant and cloned them to all my tenants when I set up the server, and they included an outbound route just for 911 and even though it was labeled "Emergency", it was set as an "Unrestricted" route. I've changed it on my system.

I think it's confusing for new installs to have a default outbound route for 911 that's labeled "Emegency" but have it set to be "unrestricted" and not an "emergency" route. Unless there's some reason that the route for 911 comes as unrestricted?

Submitted by thirdlane on Tue, 09/05/2017 Permalink

It looks that the default 911 route uses tl-dialout-1-trunk script (i believe this is from way back, before a special emergency script existed) while for a better example and to work out-of-the-box it should use tl-dialout-1-trunk-emergency. Now we have a dilemma - should we patch 911 route for all the installations (regardless of the country) or just leave it alone (possibly issuing a warning) and change this only for new installations?

Submitted by netriplex on Thu, 09/07/2017 Permalink

I recommend leaving it alone, but included a note to all customers in the "release notes" both in your forum post that you make about the new release and in the notes that are posted on the initial Thirdlane login page.

I am never a fan of new releases automatically making changes unless they are 100% necessary for compatibility purposes with changes in the new release.