Control Hub – Enhanced 911 (E911) Emergency Services (RedSky)

Enhanced 911 (E911) emergency services (RedSky)

The enhanced emergency (E911) service for Webex Calling provides an emergency service designed for organizations with a hybrid or nomadic workforce. It provides dynamic location support and a network that routes emergency calls to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) around the US, its territories, and Canada. RedSky provides an emergency call management portal (Horizon Mobility) and an integration point in Control Hub.

Important: Federal laws require customers operating voice calling systems with movable or “nomadic” lines to automatically deliver a 9-1-1 caller’s “dispatchable location” to 9-1-1 operators to enable first responders to quickly locate the caller. Learn more about this regulation and your emergency service options here.

Feature notes

The service is enabled on a per-location basis. When a location is fully enabled in Control Hub, emergency calls (933 for test calls and 911 for emergency calls) placed from all phones and soft clients assigned to that location in Control Hub use RedSky's services. RedSky's role in the solution is as follows:

• Maintains the partner/customer provisioned database that is used to map an emergency call to a dispatchable location.
• Based on a calling device's dispatchable location, directs emergency calls to the correct PSAP with information that allows the PSAP to determine the location where emergency personnel should be dispatched as well as the call-back number.
• Generates optional notifications to enterprise personnel.
• For subscriptions with enhanced licenses, bridges enterprise personnel into emergency calls placed by enterprise users and provide pop notifications.

Step 1: Log in to Horizon Mobility

As part of your welcome kit, you’ve received an email with your username and password for the Horizon Mobility portal. When you log in for the first time, you’ll be prompted to change your password.

Step 2: Create wiremaps and telephone number locations in Horizon Mobility

For your employees to be properly located as they move around your organization, each location must be mapped to a network element, such as IP Subnet, Network Switch, or Access Point. This is referred to as Network Discovery, or wire mapping, and it must be provisioned in the Horizon Mobility portal.

Before you do this, we recommend that you read through the Network Discovery Overview materials to get an understanding of how RedSky’s network discovery can be implemented in your environment.

Network Discovery Overview

Now that you have some background around network discovery, you should be ready to create your wiremaps. For step-by-step instructions on how to do this in the Horizon Mobility portal, see section 3.4 Network Discovery (starting on page 48).

To expedite importing BSSID, Buildings, Device User, LLDP, Chassis, LLDP Port, Locations, MAC Address, Private IP Range, and Trusted IP Range information into the Horizon Mobility portal, you can use the import steps to upload a completed CSV template with this information. For these steps, see the next section, Step 4.

Note: You must be logged in as an organization administrator to view, add, edit, or delete any network elements.

Step 3 (optional): Import using CSV template

Administrators can expedite importing BSSID, Buildings, Device User, LLDP, Chassis, LLDP Port, Locations, MAC Address, Private IP Range, and Trusted IP Range information into the Horizon Mobility portal by uploading CSV files.

Download the CSV template

First, you need to create the CSV file with the appropriate information for the type of import you are uploading. To do this, download the CSV template for the exact format you need for a successful import.

1. From the Horizon Mobility portal, select Importing from the left navigation.
2. Select Template Files.
3. Choose the template file that you need. Your options include:
   • MAC Assignment (optional) – Only required if you want to discover the user by the MAC address of their device. Note: This is the highest priority in the discovery protocol. This is designed for devices that don't support the HELD query process or for hard phones that are deployed connected to a network that is not in the wiremap. For example, a home router with an ethernet connection.
   • BSSID Assignment (optional) – Use this template if you are discovering devices based on their wireless access point (wireless router location). Note: Only applicable to devices that have Wi-Fi network connection enabled all the time. For example, a laptop that docks and turns off Wi-Fi needs another discovery method when docked.
   • Buildings (required*) – Physical addresses of each site where Webex Calling is provisioned with RedSky deployed. Note: This is required if a corporate wiremap is going to be used. *It is not required if the enterprise will ONLY use Webex clients and everyone is responsible for creating their own personal wiremap (self-provisioning).
   • Locations (required*) – List of all locations within each building where 911 could be dispatched in addition to the main address entrance. Note: This is required if a corporate wiremap is going to be used. It is used in conjunction with Buildings, which must be set up first. *It is not required if the enterprise will ONLY use Webex clients and everyone is responsible for creating their own personal wiremap (self-provisioning).
   • Device Users (required) – These users will be prompted to enter the address in their Webex App. Note: This only applies to users who have deployed the RedSky MyE911(r). An employee that uses the Webex client for softphones does not need to be provisioned here. The Webex client emulates, to the best degree possible, a hard phone with self-provisioning prompting for Null tokens.
   • LLDP Chassis Assignment (optional) – Only required if you want to discover the user based on the Switch the user is logged into. Note: LLDP must be enabled on the customer Layer 2 network for this feature to work. It is only applicable to hard phones.
   • LLDP Port Assignment (optional) – If you are doing discovery at the switch level, you can also fill out this sheet and provide additional detail down to the port level on the switch. Note: LLDP must be enabled on the customer Layer 2 network for this feature to work. It is only applicable to hard phones.
   • Trusted IP Range Assignment (optional) – Should be completed for each location if using public IP address for discovery.
   • Private IP Range Assignment (optional) – Only required if using Trusted IP range for discovery. Note: This would be used when an enterprise used the same private IP range in multiple buildings. Must be used in combination with Public IP, which is unique to each building.

Upload and import your completed CSV

After you’ve filled out the CSV template(s), you can import the information by following these steps:

1. 1. From the Horizon Mobility portal, select Importing from the left navigation.
   2. Select Add Import.
   3. Select the type of import you will be uploading from the drop-down menu (BSSID, Buildings, Device User, LLDP Chassis, LLDP Port, Locations, MAC Address, Private IP Range, and Trusted IP Range).

Note: When importing Chassis and Ports, the Chassis data must be imported first, as the Port data must reference the Chassis to which it belongs.

1. Select Upload CSV.
2. Click Save. Once saved, the information in your CSV file begins importing into the Horizon Mobility portal.

After the import is complete, the table shows you how many records have successfully uploaded and how many have failed. You can click on the number of failures to see more details.

Step 4: Set up emergency call notifications

Once you know where your devices are (wiremapping done in step 3), it’s time to set up emergency call notifications.

To comply with Public Law 115-127, also known as Kari’s Law, any call that's made from within your organization to emergency services must generate an email notification. You can enable notifications across all locations or customize notifications for individual locations, which can be sent to location-specific security personnel.

With the E911 service, you can get notifications to enterprise personnel through email, SMS, or a desktop application. This is configured in RedSky’s Horizon Mobility portal.

When configuring emergency call notifications in the RedSky admin portal, you can do the following:

• Specify multiple email addresses and SMS recipients. For example, you may want your emergency response team, security officer, and/or your main receptionist to get these notifications.
• Bridge your internal emergency team with emergency calls placed by users and provide pop notifications from a desktop application.
• Set up alerts when a 933 test call is placed or when a device performs a HELD request from an unknown location, providing the administrator to monitor where the users are connecting from.

For step-by-step instructions on how to set up notifications (also referred to as alerts), see section 3.1 Alerts & Emails (starting on page 23).

Note: You must be logged in as an organization administrator to view, add, edit, or delete any network elements.

Important: If you decide not to set up your emergency call notifications with the E911 service, in order to be compliant, you must, at a minimum, set it up using these steps.

Step 5: Verify E911 is enabled for your organization in Control Hub

Once you’ve created a RedSky account and provisioned wiremap-based and caller-ID based information for one or more locations, you can configure Webex Calling with the information needed to deliver emergency calls to the E911 service.

First, it’s important to verify that E911 is enabled for your organization in Control Hub. Use these steps to verify. If it’s not enabled, contact your Verizon representative (sales or support) to identify why it’s not enabled.

1. From Control Hub, select Calling from the left navigation.
2. Select Service Settings from the top navigation.
3. Scroll down to Enhanced Emergency Calling and confirm that it’s toggled on.

Step 6: Enable the E911 service for Webex Calling locations

After you’ve confirmed that the service is enabled at the organization level, you can then enable it for individual locations within your organization. In Control Hub, locations are configuration containers in which user accounts are added. This differs from RedSky configuration, which tries to track a device's actual physical location. Enabling this feature for a location in Control Hub enables all the users who are a part of that location.

Note: In addition to the E911 service for locations in Control Hub, these steps also include:

• Restarting your MPPphones in enabled locations
• Using 933 to validate in RedSky IVR for all devices in the site
• Turning on the E911 routing flag

1. 1. From Control Hub, select Locations from the left navigation.
   2. Find and select the location you would like to enable RedSky for.
   3. Select Calling.
   4. Under Emergency calling, select Enhanced emergency calling.
   5. Enable the toggle next to Allow RedSky to receive network connectivity information and test calls to allow MPP phones to place calls to RedSky's emergency test number 933.
   6. Select Save to save your changes.

This setting updates the device configuration to enable HELD functionality for all HELD compatible devices at that location. After the devices are reinitialized and pick up the new configuration they will make HELD requests to RedSky's Location Information Server (LIS) to try to determine a valid location.

This setting also routes all test calls (933) from that location to RedSky. At this point, emergency calls (911) are not impacted and are still routed to the PSTN provider.

1. 1. You are prompted to confirm the following:

Note: Depending on what you’ve already set up for the location, some of the prompts may vary.

1. 1. • Configure E911 Locations - RedSky requires you to predefine locations with dispatchable addresses that comply with your local and federal E911 regulations. Emergency services use dispatchable locations to reliably direct emergency response personnel to the location of any emergency.

Check the box to confirm and click Next.

1. 1. • Setup Alerts - FCC regulations require enterprises to notify an emergency response team whenever anyone makes a call to 911. This step confirms that you have set up email or SMS alerts for each RedSky location so that you or delegated persons can receive notifications when emergency calls are placed.

Check the box to confirm and click Next.

1. 1. • Network Elements - RedSky determines a device's location by comparing information that a device reports about its network environment--switches, wireless access points, IP address, etc.--against a configuration of your network called a "wiremap". This wiremap associates network elements to the E911 locations you configured in a previous step.

Configuring this wiremap must be completed before RedSky can reliably associate emergency callers with dispatchable addresses.

Advancing to the next step means that your HELD and HELD+ compliant devices in the specified locations will begin sharing network information to RedSky and retrieving location information from RedSky. Furthermore, Webex Calling will begin routing emergency test number calls (933) to RedSky, which connects the caller to an annunciator that reads out the dispatchable address associated with the calling device.

Actual emergency calls (911) are not yet routed to RedSky but will continue to be handled by your current PSTN provider.

Check the box to confirm and click Next.

1. 1. • Enable RedSky for Webex Calling Locations - At this point, verify that all devices in the specified locations are receiving a correct dispatchable address when they place calls to the emergency test number 933.

        Confirming this step means that actual emergency calls for devices in the specified locations will begin to route to RedSky.

        If RedSky cannot determine any location for an emergency caller, it routes the caller to a relay center so that agents can ask the caller for their location and dispatch the call to the appropriate PSAP. Any relay center call charges will be billed to you.

        Check the box to confirm and click Done.

The Route emergency calls to RedSky is automatically toggled on. This setting ensures that not only are MPP phones getting location information from a RedSky LIS, but that actual 911 calls also route to RedSky.

Important: If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you’ve set up an emergency callback number for your locations in order to complete the enhanced emergency setup. For those step-by-step instructions, see this guide.

Additional feature specifications

• In RedSky, there is a setting called HELD/HELD+ Routing Options. If this is toggled on, when an emergency call is made from a HELD / HELD+ device (which did not have an address mapping from the network info), this service will see if there is a matching DID (in Locations or User) and use the corresponding address.
• For Non-HELD devices, the above setting does not have any impact. For Non-HELD devices this service will always see if there is a matching DID (in Locations or User) and use the corresponding address.
• DECT and ATAs don't communicate with this service. Their calls route to emergency service provider, so RedSky administrative portal needs to be configured with a location associated with their caller ID.
• Emergency calls from MPP devices not physically on the wiremap (their location was not discovered through HELD) are treated based on their asserted Caller ID. If there is a location associated with the TN of a E911 user or E911 location that matches the Caller ID, the call will be routed based on that.
• Once E911 is set up for users, they are automatically prompted to update their emergency service address, as needed. Learn more here.