State legislators have announced they will introduce legislation to upgrade 911-service to cellular phones.

The bill will be in compliance with the Federal Communications Commission’s 1999 Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act, and will make it possible for 911-response centers to utilize global positioning technology to track a cell phone user’s location to within 10 meters.

Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau; Sen. Joe Liebham, R-Sheboygan; Rep. Scott Jensen, R-Waukesha; and Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Ashwaubenon, announced last Wednesday they would propose the legislation in a press conference. In a summary of the bill, the legislators cited a case of a Beloit area woman last year who was repeatedly assaulted, even after reaching a 911-response center on her cell phone, because her assailant prevented her from revealing her location.

“Its become a necessity in that our wireless calls now surpass our wire-line calls and actually have surpassed wire-line calls for about a year and a half,” Duke Ellingson, Operations Manager of Dane County Public Safety Communications, told The Badger Herald in December.

“Even if there’s an emergency at my apartment, my address wouldn’t come up,” said Erin Droese, a junior at the University of Wisconsin who uses her cell phone exclusively.

Fitzgerald said people who move frequently, like college students, might never establish a permanent wire-line because of affordable cellular plans with few charges for services such as long distance.

“People have cell phones with different area codes, how do you track that?” Droese wondered. “I would want my Madison address to show up, because it’s pretty much my permanent residence.”

Ellingson said on a wire-line call a caller’s name, phone number and address show up on a 911 dispatcher’s screen as soon as the call comes in, but precious response time is lost when dispatchers spend minutes determining a caller’s location.

“The technology is coming along, and it basically allows any cell phone to incorporate a GPS,” Fitzgerald said in December. “Based on the testimony we’ve had, it happens a lot that people really don’t know where they are, and this technology can locate them to within 10 meters.”

The FCC’s guidelines were originally meant to be in place by 2001, but after wireless companies complained and asked for more time, the commission rolled back the deadline for implementation to Dec. 31, 2005.

The bill being proposed would put the enhancement under the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission.

“Given the state’s fiscal condition, we did not want to create more bureaucracy or unnecessarily increase the cost of this worthwhile program,” the legislators said in their summary.

The bill would also place clear limits on the PSC, allowing them to gather only the necessary customer information for the program.