Emergency calling

Ringfully is not a replacement for a traditional telephone line, and must not be anyone’s only way to reach emergency services.

Dialling 9-1-1 works. But we do not send the caller’s address, the call needs power and a working internet connection, and it may reach a relay operator rather than the local dispatch centre. Keep another way to call for help wherever your people work.

In order:

1. We recognise the number before anything else does. 9-1-1 is dialled directly, without a prefix, from the dial pad or by typing it — and common misdials such as 9911 are corrected rather than sent to a wrong number.
2. The call bypasses everything else the system does. It is not put into a conference, so it cannot be recorded, put on hold, transferred or joined. Those are useful features on an ordinary call and hazards on this one.
3. Nothing is spoken to the caller first. No announcement, no menu, no delay. Warnings appear on the agent’s screen instead.
4. We present the agent’s own direct-line number where they have one, because the number presented is what decides where the call is routed.
5. The call is recorded in our system before the dial goes out, and your organization is alerted by SMS and in the application. A person has to acknowledge that alert.

1. We do not send a location. Ringfully has no emergency-address registration, which means we do not provide E911 service in the sense a traditional carrier does. Your call reaches a national emergency call centre, where an operator has to ask where you are and connect you onward. That costs time. If the caller cannot speak, is disoriented, or does not know the address they are at, responders will not be told where to go.

2. It depends on power and the internet. A power cut, an internet outage, congestion on your own network, or a failure at a provider we depend on will stop the call from being placed at all. A copper telephone line usually survives the first two.

3. The number presented may not describe where the caller is. Ringfully is used from wherever an agent happens to be — at home, travelling, in a different city or country. Routing is decided by the number, not the person, so an agent working away from the place their number is associated with may be routed on the basis of somewhere they are not.

4. Some calls will not be placed. If there is no usable number to present, the network would reject the call. Rather than fail silently, the software says twice: “This application cannot place emergency calls right now. Hang up and dial 9-1-1 from a mobile or landline phone.”

If your organization uses Ringfully, you agree to:

1. tell every person who uses it about the limits in clause 3, before they start using it and again whenever it is reasonable to remind them;
2. make sure there is another way to reach emergency services — a mobile phone, a traditional line — anywhere your people work;
3. tell anyone else who might use one of your phones, including visitors and contractors, or post the limits where they can be read; and
4. keep someone on the emergency-alert list who will actually see an alert and acknowledge it.

Never dial 9-1-1 to test anything. A test call occupies a dispatcher and an emergency line that someone else may need at that moment, and it is an offence in most places.

9-3-3 is the emergency-services test number and the only number that may be dialled to check this path. It is switched off by default on every account and an administrator has to enable it deliberately. Unlike a real emergency call, a 9-3-3 call is announced as a test before it connects.

Some localities want a test scheduled with the dispatch centre in advance. Check before you use it, and use it sparingly.

Emergency-address registration — collecting a dispatchable address per agent, keeping it current, and passing it with the call so it reaches the right dispatch centre — is the work that closes clause 3’s first limit. It is not built, and until it is, this page describes the service accurately.

We would rather publish this than a page implying a capability we do not have. If emergency calling with a registered address is a requirement for you, tell us before buying and we will tell you honestly whether to wait.

Write to [TBD]. If you are already a customer, the same limits are set out in clause 6 of the terms of service, which is the version you agreed to.