Zoom Phone Nomadic E911 Service — and Why It's So Critical Now

When moving voice services to the cloud, it is critical to understand how emergency calls will be handled when your employees are at the office or working remotely. Some cloud providers provide enhanced 911 services, while others require you to engage a third-party service. However, careful consideration of your emergency call routing is important to ensure timely response to employees in the event of an emergency and to comply with emergency response regulations like:

• Kari's Law, which provides guidelines for emergency dialing and requires designated personnel to be alerted in the event an emergency call is placed; and

• Ray Baum’s Act, which requires that information such as street address, detailed information such as building number, floor number, and suite are included in the dispatchable location information provided to public safety at the time of a 911 call.

Zoom Phone Nomadic E911 provides the ability to dynamically track the location of users as they move around your campus and beyond to ensure their location is up to date in the event of an emergency. In the U.S. and Canada, Nomadic E911 can be used from either Zoom Phone’s native PSTN calling plans and numbers or through Bring Your Own Carrier with supported third-party service providers. 

The location for the caller will be determined in the following order: Information provided from the network, starting with BSSID (Wireless Access Point ID) if available, then IP subnet (public and/or private IP addresses), then GPS (if the PC/device is equipped), and lastly, the personal or site-level static address listed in the Zoom portal.

When Zoom Phone users are on your company campus, Nomadic E911 will use the company’s wireless network access points, public/private IP addresses, and subnets to map their physical location. The mapping between company physical addresses (123 Main St., 6th floor) and corresponding network data (list of BSSIDs, list of IP addresses/ranges) is defined in the Zoom admin portal by your administrator by entering the Company Locations manually or uploading a CSV file.   

If a user dials 911 from a network location in your business campus, the corresponding physical street address will be passed along to public safety authorities and can be reported to your emergency response team. 

Zoom Phone also supports the ability for end users to define Personal Locations. When a user is at an unknown location (i.e. the user is not detected to be in one of the administrator-defined Company Locations) such as a home office, they will be prompted to review and confirm their emergency address. Once a user enters their physical street address, Zoom will automatically record the corresponding network data (wireless access point ID and/or IP addresses). Any time they are at that location in the future, it will be automatically recognized and the corresponding physical street address can be reported.   

For regulatory purposes such as Kari’s Law, it is essential for companies to have designated personnel alerted when an employee makes an emergency call. Zoom Phone makes it easy to set up an internal safety team and configure call routing to distribute calls based on company preferences, such as round robin, parallel, etc. Once this team is configured in a call queue, they can receive or monitor emergency calls and provide additional safety assistance.

An administrator can configure when a Zoom Phone user dials 911 to route the call to both the internal safety team queue and the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). Members of the internal safety queue can record, listen in, and even join the call at any time to aid in responding in a timely manner.   

Emergency 911 calls from Zoom mobile are not currently tracked by Zoom applications. Zoom mobile users will continue to use their native wireless carriers for 911 services.

To learn more about Zoom Phone’s emergency 911 services, check out the “Overview of Zoom Phone Nomadic E911” on-demand webinar. Or contact a Zoom product expert to get started with Zoom Phone today!