In an emergency, you can text your spouse, parents, best friend, neighbor or just about anyone else with a cellphone and ask them for help. But, in Tennessee, you can't text 911.

According to a report in the Knoxville News Sentinel, no city or county in Tennessee currently accepts text messages to 911, even though the Federal Communications Commission has been trying to get emergency call centers to embrace text messaging, and advocates for deaf people, domestic violence victims and others have been pushing for the service for years.

The FCC took steps last month to accelerate text-to-911 service across the country. The federal agency ordered that text message providers that aren't already making the service available must do so by the end of the year in jurisdictions that can handle such messages.

Tennessee was part of a pilot program to test 911 texting in 2012, but the program has yet to materialize. According to a January 2014 article written by Mike Dano with Questex Media Group, he said AT&T told him they were not yet ready for text to 911. Dano reported that AT&T experts in Tennessee stated, "We have discovered that we need to deploy additional security elements in the network before the trial can begin." The company suggested they would be ready by the end of the first quarter to release their 911 text system, but have not done so.

Source:

Partner Station WMSR
FierceWireless.com Story by Mike Dano