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Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

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Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#121

Post by nneonneo »

Kwpolska wrote: post #111
shawnz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any data on how often this occurs with other brands, or what the failure rate was (i.e. how many attempts to call 911 succeeded in that time?) Otherwise 20+ reports certainly sounds bad but I don't really have a perspective on how bad it is. It could very well be that 20 failures across a year is within the expected failure rate due to unavoidable transient network issues.

The author of the linked Reddit post was unable to find anything for other Android brands, and only three cases across ten years for iPhones.

And, it’s worth pointing out that the sales volumes of iPhones and just Samsungs (not counting any other brand) are many times that of Pixel, so if there was an issue even nearly as frequent with those phones it would definitely have been noticed by now.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#122

Post by Kwpolska »

tsunamifury wrote: post #60

I will say I have had plenty of similar issues across my iPhone devices. For a variety of reasons these phones fail to make calls. Drop calls or can’t dial 911. I suspect voice calling itself has become network deprioritized or still has trouble selecting between calling tech. I worked on dialer for pixel and and am deeply familiar with these problems. Voice call tech is easily one of those mostly worthlessly convolu…

Emergency calls should have the highest priority on networks.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#123

Post by zja »

denysvitali wrote: post #90
numpad0 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that: - Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously. - 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers. - Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties. etc.

Yes, I think the real problem is #2. The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911. Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely…

> the only way to test is... to call 911

You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#124

Post by philipov »

denysvitali wrote: post #109
philipov wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.

A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments. Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.

If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#125

Post by petabytes »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

When you hold down the power button, there is a big red emergency button beside the restart button. I've gotten pretty close to accidentally pressing it.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#126

Post by unethical_ban »

gok wrote: post #100
fluidcruft wrote: post #79

All cell phones with 911 functionality should have a way to periodically test that the 911 feature is fully functional. The reality is that I rarely even make a phone call anymore... but I don't even know whether being able to make a call implies 911 works? And I don't know if its still true but there used to be pretty significant fines for calling 911 so I'm not just going to dial 911 and say "making sure this still…

[flagged]

No, this is entirely untrue.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#128

Post by IshKebab »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #105

There should be some kind of test number twin of 911 that works exactly the same (without SIM, supplying E911 data), but just plays a pre-recorded message optionally with some "debug" info.

That is such an obviously good idea I'm surprised it doesn't exist. Apparently the official way to test it in the UK is to email them and schedule a test. They say they use the real 999 because that's the best way to guarantee that it works, and that's true - but there's definitely utility in having an almost-real number that you can test at any time guilt free.

They probably just can't be bothered to set it up tbh.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#129

Post by nneonneo »

tsunamifury wrote: post #60

I will say I have had plenty of similar issues across my iPhone devices. For a variety of reasons these phones fail to make calls. Drop calls or can’t dial 911. I suspect voice calling itself has become network deprioritized or still has trouble selecting between calling tech. I worked on dialer for pixel and and am deeply familiar with these problems. Voice call tech is easily one of those mostly worthlessly convolu…

When did you have problems dialing 911 with an iPhone? It seems like something worth reporting - feedback to Apple, public posting, etc.

Dropped calls etc. do happen for a variety of reasons, but there have been next to no reports of iPhones being unable to dial 911 (assuming a decent cell signal, etc.), and that would be a much more serious issue.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#130

Post by joecool1029 »

usr1106 wrote: post #12
chrismorgan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If talking about the US (though it’s not the only place that uses the number 911, and I would imagine that other countries’ numbers would be affected): all the major 3G networks have been shut down, so your current options for major networks are T-Mobile’s 2G network (which I successfully dialed 911 with a couple of months ago while in the US, but it’s only spottily available, and it’s being shut down next year), or…

At least 2 decades ago when I worked with phones the phone as a list of emergency numbers which could be updated to country-spefic values. Often 000, 112, and 911 were always present. Once the software notices one of these numbers dialled call handling will go a completely different code path than normal calls. I have no idea how things work in Android, where you obviously must have VoIP hooks?

>I have no idea how things work in Android, where you obviously must have VoIP hooks?

Yes, there's emergency IMS (basically volte/vonr version of SIP) profiles the phone is supposed to register to and all the carriers towers advertise emergency numbers in their signaling.

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