Back in 2003, an analyst's report noted admiringly that Intrado provided more than 80% of the nation's 911 service (both traditional telephone and wireless).  But the analyst was cautious about Intrado's future:

It is popular to highlight the importance of emergency services at the state and local level, but to back the rhetoric with funding is another thing.

Since then, of course, things have changed -- the FCC has mandated that VoIP services very quickly find ways to provide E911 capabilities to their subscribers.  Intrado has found yet another source of funding.

Not that Intrado was doing badly -- far from it.  In several presentations to the FCC over the last year, Intrado emphasized that it counted as its customers all of the Baby Bells, over 40 wireless carriers, and more than 800 cities and government agencies.  It touted its "strong relationships" with over 7700 emergency call centers.  Intrado recently announced that it was now in a position to provide VoIP services with nationwide coverage, through its deals with telephone companies and public safety call centers. 

Intrado is 911 in America.

Here's how it works for VoIP: 

1.  A VoIP customer calls 911.

2.  The call goes to the VoIP provider's server, using SIP.

3.  The VoIP provider then queries Intrado's servers.  Why?  Because Intrado has an amazing database of subscriber address information -- 206 million records.  And often people in emergencies can't say where they are, so E911 (or "enhanced" 911) requires that there be a way to associate their location with the call.

4.  Intrado's servers then route the call to the relevant telephone company's "selective router" -- the physical piece of hardware that is dedicated to getting calls to the emergency call centers (or PSAPs). 

5.  At the same time, Intrado routes the customer's telephone number and address into the Automatic Location Information Database used for E911 calls in the US.  This is the legacy way of attaching address information to calls, with a twist:  Intrado forces new data into the ALI database at this point in the transaction, tagged uniquely in such a way (as I understand it) that the PSAP operator can pull it out and associate the data with the call.

Intrado is doing all of this for almost all emergency calls in this country -- running the database, connecting to the selective routers, associating the call with the address information.  And maybe that's fine.  We wouldn't want to confuse our emergency calls, and Intrado has been doing this for thirty years.

But the part I'm troubled about is the influence that Intrado appears to have had -- going slowly here -- over the entire E911 for VoIP situation.  Frequent readers know that my opinion is that it made no sense to force the old legacy E911 solution onto all VoIP providers, with its reliance on selective routers (hardware!) and its inflexibility.

But it did make sense to Intrado to have things go this way.  And so they met, month after month, with the Commmission staff, talked on the phone, did their best, and ended up with a lot more business.  AT&T's CallVantage uses Intrado.  Verizon uses Intrado.  Vonage uses Intrado.

Enter Intrado.