Modern telecommunications services, particularly wireless mobile communication devices, can be utilized to enhance public safety. During emergencies, these devices are indispensible for contacting the appropriate people or authorities. Traditionally, when a user places a call for help, the call signal is routed to the nearest emergency facility with respect to the user's current geographic location. In this manner, the “closest” emergency responder can be dispatched rapidly to that geographic locale. Automatic number identification (ANI) and/or automatic location identification (ALI) technology can be employed to readily identify the phone number and ultimately the physical location of the caller. Telephony technologies, such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP), have permitted users to place calls anywhere around the world cost-effectively. Thus, the popularity of this technology continues to grow, particularly as broadband and cellular services are developed to improve the quality of VoIP calls. Unfortunately, traditional telephony infrastructure have limited to no capability to correlate physical locations of Internet-based calls.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that effectively and efficiently enables the determination of the physical locations of communication devices for processing of packetized voice calls.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds