Forum Discussion
Kari's Law - Direct access to 911 required by Feb. 16, 2020 - Anyone Implemented this yet?
So fresh off of Enterprise Connect our telephony people have brought up the topic of Kari's Law - https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/582/text - Our team was curious if anyone has this implemented with their instance of Skype for Business with Enterprise Voice? We're looking to gather up any best practices and lessons learned to help us in the implementation with this in our environment. Did you spend a lot of time educating your end users about this change and what the potential downstream effects would be? Did you work with local dispatchers to ease into the transition? Posted the topic in Microsoft Teams Discussions as well to get input.
Thanks!
Hi,
Kari's Law Act requires you to setup your PBX so that users can dial 911 without any prefix, so previously some PBXs were setup so that you had to dial 9 to get out to PSTN so a call to 9+911. With Teams and Skype you use Dial plans to configure this, that is no problem. If you came from an old system required you to prefix calls with a digit you should also allow that in your Skype environment, so that both 9+911 and 911 is allowed.
Right, the how is not too bad - we are on the preparation side of things... how much communication, do we need to talk to some of the local emergency dispatchers? That kind of stuff.
TimLBYou actually need to spend a good amount of time understanding how the 911 laws pertain to your company in the locations where you have sites. Even outside of federal standards, many local jurisdictions have specific requirements around 911. Specifically, the verbiage of the rule is such that it can be widely open to legal interpretation that may require a more complex architecture even for basic deployments. Keeping that in mind, network operations processes may require a change since they may become a liability.
I spent an awful lot of time working on this in Texas and there are interesting caveats here based on the way the law was written. If you are at all going to have a conversation about Emergency Services, be sure to engage your Health and Safety, Compliance, and Legal teams before determining what the solution will look like.
