How to Use RingCentral’s Nomadic E911 Feature
Updating the E911 Emergency Address allows you to implement changes to the physical address of a DigitalLine. The same address will be used by 911 to trace the origin of a 911 call in the US. The E911 address is the address used to send to Fire / Police / other Emergency Services teams when a 911 call is placed. It is a requirement to provide an accurate address to ensure a timely response in case of emergency. If a phone is moved physically to a new address, that information must be updated immediately.
The challenge here is how to keep your E911 Emergency Address always up to date, even if you move frequently(a.k.a, nomadic). The RingCentral Nomadic E911 feature enables you to automatically update your E911 Emergency Address with ease. Today we are going to do an interesting experiment. First things first, let’s cover some basics:
Enable/disable RingCentral Nomadic E911
After you login https://service.ringcentral.com, you can find a section named “Automatic Location Updates”:
And you can see there are three sub tabs that I marked with #1 / #2 / #3. They allow you to enable/disable RingCentral Nomadic E911 feature globally / by extension / by device, respectively.
For this experiment, we simply enable everything that we can enable. So that all the extensions / devices will have Nomadic E911 feature enabled.
Three maps
In order for Automatic Location Update to work, we need to create maps. Maps are used to determine your current location. There are 3 kinds of maps:
#1 Wireless Access Point Map, allows you to enter information for all wireless access points in your enterprise including detailed location information.
#2 IP Address Range Map, allows you to enter details for all IP address ranges in your enterprise including detailed location information.
#3 Switch Map, allows you to enter details for all Ethernet switches in your enterprise including detailed location information.
You don’t need to create all 3 of them. You can just start with one and provide as much location map information as you can.
BSSID
In this experiment, we will only take advantage of the Wireless Access Point Map. And before we work on this map, there is an important technical term we need to know: BSSID
The BSSID is the MAC address of the wireless access point (WAP) generated by combining the 24 bit Organization Unique Identifier (the manufacturer’s identity) and the manufacturer’s assigned 24-bit identifier for the radio chipset in the WAP.
How to find the BSSID of an access point
You can find several different solutions if you google it. It really depends on your operating system and your own preference. I am using macOS and I find two ways to find my current BSSID.
The first way is to hold the Option key while clicking the WiFi icon in the upper right corner. BSSID will be listed in the drop-down menu:
The other way is to use the airport command line utility:
Add an item into the Wireless Access Point Map
It’s pretty straight forward, you just specify the BSSID, Emergency Address and a Nickname.
Do it programmatically
Just in case you have lots of data to enter — good new is that RingCentral provides an API for this task. Below is some code snippets in C#:
So even if you have thousands of data items to enter, you can easily enter them via the API in batch.
Test RingCentral Nomadic E911
OK, with all the prerequisite knowledge above, now we can get to the most exciting part.
We’ll do the experiment at RingCentral’s headquarter. There are two office buildings located next to each other which are: 19 Davis Drive & 20 Davis Drive. I pick a location from these two buildings, which I plan to pick the Patio at 19 Davis Drive and Tyler’s desk at 20 Davis drive.
On those two picked locations, I find the connected wireless access point BSSIDs. And I entered the two records into the Wireless Access Point Map:
Then I login into the RingCentral softphone:
Currently I am at my own desk, my emergency address should already be set automatically.
I login https://service.ringcentral.com, go to Phone System, Phones & Devices, User Phones and find my own softphone:
I confirm that the emergency address is up to date. Now I move to the patio of 19 Davis Drive with my laptop and softphone running in it:
Again I login https://service.ringcentral.com, go to Phone System, Phones & Devices, User Phones and find my own softphone:
And I confirm that emergency address has been updated correctly after I moved my physical location!
By the way, you can verify your emergency address by calling the 911 address verification service which is 933 with your RingCentral softphone.
Troubleshooting
You might come across some issues during the experiment. Here is a list of some common issues:
If you are testing with softphone, make sure that your device & phone number are properly tracked on service web. Login https://service.ringcentral.com, go to Phone System, Phones & Devices, User Phones, find your phone number that you are testing, and make sure its status icon is green. You probably won’t have an issue unless you’ve tried to login multiple phone numbers on the same device. If it’s not green, root cause might be your physical device (computer or mobile phone) has been associated with another number. You can go to that number’s detail page and deauthorize your device. Then back to softphone on your device, try logging out & then logging back in again with the right phone number.
One more thing that I want to mention is data format. For BSSID, our API only accepts upper case ones. For example, you need to convert 5c:5b:35:3c:31:91 to 5C:5B:35:3C:31:91 before you can submit it to our system.
For address, the street must be geocoded while street2 doesn’t have to be. Take 20 Davis Drive, 3rd floor, Tyler’s Desk for example, street is 20 Davis Drive while street2 is 3rd floor, Tyler’s Desk. If you don’t follow the rules illustrated in this example, you won’t be able to submit data via the API successfully.
Summary
RingCentral Nomadic E911 feature is such a useful feature — imagine a large enterprise with thousands of employees and several buildings with thousands of rooms, desks…etc. It could be a nightmare to maintain the emergency address without this Nomadic E911 feature.
That concludes my experiment about RingCentral Nomadic E911. I hope this article has given you some insights about emergency address management automation. Thanks for reading!
To learn even more about other features we have make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.
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