Re: WebRTC and emergency communications (Was: Re: IETF Meeting in South

At 11:58 AM 5/28/2013, Ted Hardie wrote:
> On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Jari Arkko 
> <<mailto:jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net>jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:
> James:
>
> > did you know that you have a audio/video realtime interactive 
> communications WG churning out proposals and solutions that is 
> *actively* ignoring "emergency communications" in its entirety? No? 
> Look at RTCweb, which will become a dominant form of interactive 
> communications between humans in the near future. You have an 
> equally active WG in the same area that is addressing emergency 
> communications (ECRIT) that is further along/mature in its 
> documents (i.e., they've already produced the bulk of their RFCs, 
> specifically RFC 6443 and 6881).
> >
> > Given that young people already think contacting a local 
> emergency call center (PSAP) can or should be achievable through 
> SMS, IM, twitter and Facebook... just how long does anyone think it 
> will be before calling 911/112/999 will be requested or mandated 
> through WEBrtc/RTCweb?
> >
> > Waiting will only make it more painful to retrofit it into the 
> future RFCs produced by RTCweb.
> I knew that WebRTC is happening fast, including implementations 
> coming out before standards. I don't think everyone have yet 
> realised the full impact this technology will have.
> I didn't know about the details of the emergency communications 
> situation. But it is always difficult to balance getting something 
> out early vs. complete. I know how much pressure there is on the 
> working groups to keep up with things actually happening in the 
> browsers and organisations setting up to use this technology. Do you 
> think the retrofit will be problematic, and do you have a specific 
> suggestion about what should be included today?
> Jari
>
>
> I'm replying here, rather than down thread, because I believe it's 
> important to tackle two different statements here:  one James' and one Jari's.
> The first is James' that RTCWEB is ignoring Emergency 
> Services.  Perhaps by "actively ignoring" James means that the 
> working group considered emergency services and made a decision he 
> did not agree with, which is that the baseline capabilities already 
> allows a PSAP or other emergency service to provide a WebRTC 
> application that would work to connect you to its emergency 
> responders, and that this was enough.
> As context, it's very important to recognize that the WebRTC efforts 
> in the IETF and W3C *are not building a telephone into a 
> browser*.  We could have done that in a few weeks.   The groups 
> *are* creating building blocks that allow a javascript application 
> within a browser or mobile context to add peer-to-peer audio, video, 
> or data channels to whatever *its* application happens to be.  That 
> application can be a game (we often use a poker game as an example 
> here), a puzzle (there's an example where you compete with a peer in 
> unscrambling a tiled video feed), or a pure data exchange (where 
> neither audio or video are passed).
> In that context, the group considered two questions:
>
> can you use the WebRTC building blocks to create an application to 
> talk to emergency responders?
> should every application be required to have the ability to talk to 
> emergency responders?
> It gave the answer to the first one as "yes", and I am convinced 
> that any emergency responder that wished to create such an 
> application could do so with the existing building blocks.  A set of 
> emergency responders could even create and distribute one that was 
> highly generalized and took advantage of  LoST's facilities to be 
> useful in many locations.
> To the second question, the working group answered "no".  There are 
> applications of WebRTC which are not general-purpose communications, 
> including some applications where there will be no audio or video at 
> all.  Requiring that a puzzle should provide you 911 service because 
> it happens to provide have live video is not really 
> sensible.  Fundamentally, making every application also be a 
> generalized telephony application with ECRIT support makes no more 
> sense here than it would for desktop applications; you could equally 
> require a text processor connected to the network to support texting 
> emergency responders--after all, it has the UI facilities and the 
> user's attention, right?
> The second statement is Jari's, which seems to imply that the 
> implementations coming out before standards is a problem in the 
> WebRTC case.  The implementers in this case are also very active 
> contributors to both the IETF and W3C efforts, and they are feeding 
> implementation experience into the process.  That's a good thing, 
> since it is coming along with a willingness to change 
> implementations to match group consensus.  That won't last forever, 
> obviously, but we have that now and should continue to take 
> advantage of it while we do.
> That's my personal take, in any case, as someone who has been 
> actively involved in both efforts.
Ted - this view (I believe) doesn't reconcile with the view stated by 
Henning's yesterday.
(truth be told, it's hard to separate Henning's stated views from his 
official title and his official organization, given that he writes 
the types of regulations the IETF community merely reads (about)...
"The most difficult part for any emergency calling system is location 
delivery. WebRTC probably doesn't have much impact on emergency calls 
if all the calls traverse a server of some kind and if the caller 
location can be looked up based on caller IP addresses, but once you 
have the end system involved in location determination (e.g., for 
mobile devices or for DHCP-delivered location), it has to know when a 
call is an emergency call as you otherwise end up providing location 
for every call, which is non-ideal from a privacy and battery perspective.
At least in the US, many of the WebRTC services would be considered 
"interconnected VoIP", so they are indeed subject to 911 obligations."
James

BTW- yeah, I know I'm picking a fight - but Jari singled this topic 
out as an example of how various regions of the world differ on how 
they handle certain applications, emergency services being one of a 
very short list he mentioned.

> regards,
>
> Ted Hardie