At about 5 a.m. on Feb. 16, Karla Gutierrez's white BMW careened off the Florida Turnpike in West Miami-Dade County and plunged into a canal.
Panicked and unsure of what to do, the 32-year-old Miami resident dialed emergency 911 on her cell phone and begged for help.
The 911 operator asked Gutierrez for the location of her car. Gutierrez said she didn't know it and gave conflicting information on where she had been before the accident.
"OK, honey, you have to tell me," the operator told a crying Gutierrez. "I can't help you if you don't tell me where you are at."
The line cut off, apparently when Gutierrez's car submerged under water. By the time emergency dispatchers arrived at the canal, 50 minutes later, Gutierrez was dead.
In an interview on NBC's Dateline shortly after the accident, Gutierrez's fiancé blasted the emergency operator for not explaining to Gutierrez how to get out of the car.
As the 3.5-minute 911 tape revealed, the operator had indeed asked Gutierrez to escape through the window or door, but a panicked Gutierrez replied the water would only pour into the vehicle.
The finger-pointing didn't stop there.
Emergency dispatchers responded by blaming the cell phone industry: If dispatchers had been able to pinpoint her location -- as they can with home phone calls, they would have known where to find her.
But nothing has changed since Gutierrez's death. Emergency dispatchers still can't pinpoint the location of cell-phone callers and they are still pointing fingers at the wireless industry.
The technology is available, and the Federal Communications Commission has implored the cell phone industry to implement it.
But in the face of an FCC-mandated deadline that says that by Oct. 1 the industry must begin selling cell phones that can be tracked when used to call 911 -- enhanced 911, or e911 -- every major carrier has filed a petition to extend that date.
Carriers and handset manufacturers have balked at the complexity of the technology and its enormous costs to implement.
"The carriers are out to make revenue and money," said Alan Nogee, an analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group. "They don't see e911 as an immediate revenue builder for them.... It's costly for them to deploy it. It's going to take years before they make money from location-based services.
"Most of these carriers have been testing various systems and deciding what they are going to do, but they've been doing this at a slower (pace) than they should be."
The carriers can't win. Not only are they being mandated by the FCC, who was ordered by Congress to make the carriers implement a wireless 911 system, they have also been attacked by privacy advocates.
Privacy-minded consumers are concerned that the government will use the technology to keep tabs on their every move. Most recently, a Palo Alto, California man was convicted of murdering his wife, after a Verizon Communications engineer testified that the position of his cell-phone's antenna was much closer to his house, the location of the crime scene, than at work -- where the defendent claimed he was driving from when the murder took place.
Customers are also worried that they will be bombarded with annoying location-based marketing -- such as a coupon for a cheeseburger when they pass by a McDonald's -- once carriers know their location. Sen. John Edwards (D-North Carolina) has responded to this issue in the way of legislation that protects the users of wireless devices with global positioning system (GPS) chips.
Under the bill, which will be reviewed by the Senate next month, wireless service providers have to notify customers when collecting information about their location. Companies cannot disclose or sell this information without first obtaining the customer's permission. The bill, however, makes an exception for wireless 911 calls.
But the cell phone industry isn't the only party unprepared to field wireless 911 calls. Public Safety Answering Points -- PSAPs, as the emergency dispatchers are called -- aren't set up to handle wireless phone calls, either.
"Another challenge we face together is the lack of uniform implementation plans," Thomas Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, said in a letter to the National Emergency Number Association. "Individual dealings with 6,800 PSAPs is cumbersome, costly and counterproductive.... Deployment of wireless e911 will require tens of thousands of individual contracts and extensive local program management."
Jim Goerke, a director at the National Emergency Number Association, said the public safety community is ready to implement wireless 911. It's just waiting on the carriers to do their part.
Goerke said public safety administrators are "concerned" by the recent wave of carriers asking for waivers on the Oct. 1 deadline to implement the first phase of wireless 911 services.
"I feel like the continued exchange of the observations and characterizations in that (Wheeler's) correspondence really doesn't serve well," he said. "We need to talk to each other."
Yet Wheeler's correspondence highlighted the industry's main challenge in implementing e911 services: There is no affordable way to do it.
Unlike fixed-lines phones -- which are tied to a house address -- a mobile phone can use any one of the thousands of towers in the country. Carriers today can pinpoint phone calls based on the locations of cell towers. But the towers can be up to 20 miles apart -- a vast area for police to scour in an emergency.
Carriers today are looking at three different and very expensive options to implement wireless 911 technology.
They can have handset manufacturers place GPS chips in the phones that send information to satellites, then relay that data to carriers. However, this system will add another $25 to $40 to the cost of the handset, which the carriers subsidize, analysts say.
Another possibility is to place hardware and software in cell-phone towers and let mathematical equations determine the location of a cell phone's signals.
Most carriers are implementing a third way -- a hybrid solution that includes the software, hardware, GPS, much cooperation between the various parts of the industry and lots of patience on the part of consumers.
"The technology doesn't exist anywhere else in the world," CTIA spokesman Travis Larson said. "It's not like we can go to Radio Shack, pull it off the shelf and duct-tape it to our phones. This is high-tech stuff."
"The wireless industry has every incentive to get this up and running," Larson added. "We understand that people buy wireless phones for safety purposes."
The FCC is currently reviewing 14 petitions from carriers and cell phone manufacturers, including Sprint PCS, AT&T Wireless, Samsung and Motorola, asking for extensions on the Oct. 1 deadline. The FCC has already granted VoiceStream Wireless a temporary stay because it is switching from a cell-phone-based to network-based system.
A spokeswoman said the FCC is currently reviewing the petitions, and will not automatically grant a waiver to all the carriers. The FCC hasn't decided how it will punish carriers who fail to abide by the e911 regulations, she said.
In the meantime, emergency rescuers dispatched this piece of advice to drivers in Gutierrez's horrific position: Don't wait for help. Unbuckle your seatbelt, open or break your window and get out immediately, Captain Ed Brown, the person in charge of Miami-Dade fire rescue teams told MSNBC. Usually it takes two to three minutes for a car to submerge under water, he said.
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