Social Policy Update: E 911, CALEA, Disability Access
Tuesday, October 19, 2004, 5:15pm - 6:30pm

The Plain Old Telephone Service includes a lot of capabilities that service a variety of needs not directly associated with phone calls. These services have come about over decades of adaption on the traditional circuit switched network. With VoIP coming of age, many people are of the opinion that VoIP should be expected to support all of these goals. This panel shares the expectations and offers some solutions to support the public good.

Rick Jones is Operations Issues Director for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). As part of his staff responsibilities, he actively participates in various telecommunications industry standards development organizations and other related groups. He also assists regarding identifying issues and providing staff support for the NENA Operations leadership (various operational committee chairs). He has spent 25 years in public safety/emergency communications, including 12 years as a 9-1-1 call center supervisor/manager in northern Illinois. He has been actively involved, representing 9-1-1 and public safety, in development work for several telecom technical issues, such as number portability/pooling, since 1996.

Timothy Jasionowski is Chief Technology Officer of Streamdoor, a United Kingdom-based company specializing in wholesale deployment of IP Communications services. He has overall responsibility for defining and building Streamdoor's services architecture, technology roadmap and relationships with technology partners, as well as oversees product and service management.

Prior to joining Streamdoor, Jasionowski managed a consulting practice concentrating on the development of new telecommunication and Internet services. He was also Director of Product Incubation and Strategy at Qwest Communications, managing the initial product and deployment strategies for VoIP and other new services, as well as Senior Manager of America Online Programs.

Brian Rosen is President/Founder of Emergicom, an emerging company dedicated to bringing public safety communications into the Internet Age. Mr. Rosen has a 35 year history of bringing innovative products to markets including VoIP, video telephony, medical devices and workstations. Prior to Emergicom, Brian was VP, Technology Introduction for Marconi, where he conceived of, and led the team that developed the acclaimed ViPr Virtual Presence system. Mr. Rosen has been very active in VoIP standards efforts including the IETF and NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, where he currently serves as the Chair of the Long Term Definition Working Group of the VoIP/Packet Technical Committee. He is also co-editor of NRIC VII Focus Group 1b and 1d reports which address upgrades to public safety communications systems.

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at Columbia University, New York. He is currently chair of the Department of Computer Science.

Protocols co-developed by him, such as RTP, RTSP and SIP, are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. His research interests include Internet multimedia systems, ubiquitous computing, mobile systems, quality of service, and performance evaluation.

Jim Tobias has thirty years experience in technology and disability in both the public and private sectors. He was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs and Bellcore.

He sat on the Access Board's Telecommunications Accessibility Advisory Committee responsible for drafting Section 255 regulations, and the FCC's Consumer/Disabilities Technical Advisory Committee. He is co-Chair of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Accessibility Forum.

Mr. Tobias developed several accessibility projects: an innovative deaf relay service that integrated speech detection and text-to-speech, a network-based talking PIM for blind users, and a database-driven customized interface for voice mail and IVR accessibility.

©2004 pulver.com. All rights reserved.