So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

It’s going to depend a bit on the agency, different places use different systems and have different policies available to them.

Where I work, we used to have Google maps integrated into our CAD (Computer Added Dispatch) so it would sync to the built in map in our CAD. I believe it was some sort of 3rd party plugin, not something the cad developers officially supported, so it was always kind of slow and buggy, and some update that happened a couple years ago totally broke it so we no longer have that.

We do use Google maps through a web browser pretty frequently. We have most of the businesses, parks, schools, cemeteries, etc. loaded into our CAD, but they’re not labeled on the map, and sometimes being able to ask “can you see the Starbucks from where you are” can be kind of useful, and the satellite view is really useful for our more rural areas where they may not be many obvious landmarks and it’s all fields and trees.

Some departments have some stricter internet usage policies and such and may not be able to use Google maps.

Street view has its uses, mostly for narrowing down the exact address. Most of the time it’s not super necessary, we can send police out to the nearest intersection if needed, and they can find “the big house with a red door” or whatever themselves, but if we can narrow down the exact address, sometimes we may have important caution note attached to the address, and of course it can sometimes shave a few minutes off of our response time if our responders don’t have to go hunting for the right house.

One of the times street view came in particular handy for me was one time I had a 3rd party calling about something for a friend. They weren’t sure of the exact address, but they knew the road and some nearby landmarks that had it narrowed down to about 2 or 3 blocks. The caller kept saying that there was a “big yellow walkman” on the front porch, and was too worked up to really elaborate on what she meant by that. I turned to street view and just kind of went down the block looking at porches until I found one that had one of those fluorescent yellow/green “children at play” signs people put in the street that are shaped like a kid walking and it clicked that that was what she meant.

It’s not just youth, it’s people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.

I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.

In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I’d say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn’t any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is “who was in boy scouts”

And it’s not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it’s been used as a joke in movies for decades. It’s probably gotten somewhat worse since people don’t use paper maps as much anymore, but there’s also a “use it or lose it” aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there’s probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven’t had to in over a decade.

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

I’ve heard of some area where the dispatchers are technically considered LEOs and sometimes end up doing stuff like assisting with searching incoming prisoners and such.

It also kind of highlights another issue with the field, on the federal level we’re classified as clerical staff, basically just basic office staff. Different states, counties, and such may make different classifications, but it’s a bit of a crapshoot. That can have an effect on what kind of benefits we’re entitled to, how much we get paid, when we can retire, etc. There’s a bit of a push to have us reclassified to the same category (I believe it’s called “protective services” or something along those lines) as first responders (I believe the most recent version of that bill was called the 911 SAVES act, not sure what the current status of that is.) One of our little propaganda slogans is that we’re the first first responders. I don’t necessarily think we should be in the same category as cops and firefighters and such, were not on location putting ourselves physically in danger, but the kinds of stress and such from the job are probably more in-line with what they do than what some clerk working in an office at the courthouse experiences, IMO a 3rd category is probably most appropriate, but it’s probably a lot easier to just reclass us as first responders than to creat a whole new classification from scratch.

And depending on where you work, dispatch may be part of the local PD, it may be part of the county sheriff’s department or state police, or it may be part of your county’s department of public safety (that’s the case where I work)

A whole lot in this profession can be summed up as “it varies from one jurisdiction to another” so I can really only speak for where I work.

Some places do much more complicated background check processes than others. Whatever the background check process at my county is, it was pretty streamlined and out-of-sight, out-of-mind for me as an applicant, so I can’t give too much detail on it.

I don’t remember them calling any of my references, though I was able to get someone who already worked here to put in a good word for me so that may have given me a leg-up on that. There was a psych eval, I wouldn’t exactly call it extensive, it was a quick sit-down with the county shrink and then a long multiple choice personality test thing that seemed more like it was measuring ability to play well with others than screening for any significant mental issues.

I did have to pass a drug test, and it was a hair test which I believe has a longer window of detection than a pee test, but as long as you can pass that they don’t really care about past drug use if you’re up-front about it, and honestly I’m pretty sure a pretty decent amount of my coworkers and at least one of my supervisors like to smoke up occasionally, if we ever cause a significant incident or they have reason to suspect that we’re intoxicated at work, we are subject to drug testing, but it’s not like we’re getting regularly tested, and I’ve never heard of anyone having to get tested in the 5+ years I’ve been here. Of course we are subject to a lot of different federal and state regulations so of course pot is officially forbidden,but you’d kind of have to really fuck up to get caught for it. Certain things like a DUI could lead to your certifications being revoked.

I’ve heard a lot of places have you do a polygraph test, mine doesn’t (which is good because polygraphs are all kinds of bullshit)

We also did get fingerprinted by our county detectives and I assume that got ran through the background check as well.

We did have one or two hires with some kind of sketchy things in their past that probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks but did, though I will say they were weeded out pretty quickly during training.

As far as pay goes, again it varies a lot. I think I make ok money, I’m not rolling in it by a longshot but I’m staying afloat and managing to save a bit. The benefits are solid of course. Last I checked, I think we’re one of the lowest-paid dispatch centers in our immediate area, although we’re also one of the only non-union ones around here too, which is probably to be expected. That has its pluses and minuses, one of the first things that usually that comes with the contract negotiations is mandatory OT since every dispatch center struggles with staffing so we’ve managed to avoid that.

I made about 66k last year after my shift differential (night shift gets paid a bit more,) overtime (I rarely come in for unscheduled OT, but the way our regular schedule works we go over 40 hours a week every other week) etc. people who have more certifications than I do can make a decent bit more than that at my center. I think it’s decent pay for the actual work we do, but not necessarily for the amount of liability we take on. There’s a lot of places that definitely pay a lot less than that. Some of the higher-ups in our department and county government have really been going to bat for us and wrangled us some pretty substantial raises over the last couple years and I’m making substantially more than I did when I started, so at least here the situation is definitely improving.

I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I’m not part of the test group, so I’m not totally clear on all the details about how we’re handling it.

But some concerns I’d have are

1. Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn’t want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there’s a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.

2. Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.

3. Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We’re handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I’d be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone’s home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they’re doing. We’re not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can’t have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it’s a pretty controlled environment.

4. Physical proximity to other people is useful, we’re always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it’s asking them to call another agency while we’re on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there’s a lot going on in our system, and they’re constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there’s a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn’t get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn’t find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one’s literally falling asleep on the job.

5. Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we’re constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don’t have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn’t really want to work without them long term (once in a while we’ve had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it’s a pretty big pain in the ass)

Some of these are weird edge cases, but that’s also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it’s better if half of us aren’t even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there’s widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn’t do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There’s a balance to be struck, I’m not totally sure what it is, but it’s something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we’re still able to provide an acceptable level of service.

Pen-testing: penetration testing, basically good guy hacking to find security vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed, basically finding out how easy a security system is to penetrate.

Debugging: fixing problems in hardware and software

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), radio, NFC (Near Field Communication,) infrared, Bluetooth: different forms of wireless communication.

RFID is used for stuff like security tags on merchandise, car key fobs

NFC is similar (you could probably make an argument that NFC is basically a type of RFID) with a very short range used for things like making payments with your phone

Bluetooth you’re probably somewhat familiar with, in used for a lot of consumer electronics, wireless headphones, speakers, computer mice, etc.

All of those use radio waves in some form to pass information from one device to another.

Infrared uses a infrared light to send information, the most common use you’ve probably seen is for TV remotes, which is why you have to point the remote at the TV to work, you’re basically flashing an invisible flashlight at the sensor on the TV

This device can basically mimic any of those kinds of signals allowing it access, control, or bypass devices and systems that use those protocols.

This can be useful for people working on those kinds of systems, you don’t need to have the actual key card, remote, device, etc. to test it out, you can try a bunch of different configurations without needing to reprogram the card a bunch of times, and gives you a lot of options to test for different vulnerabilities and issues.

But those same capabilities make it attractive to people who would use it maliciously. If they don’t have the right security measures in place, something like this device could be used to gain access to secure areas by spoofing a key card, unlock cars, interfere with cell phones, snoop on wireless communications, gain access to a someone’s devices, etc.

If it weren’t for Musk standing to make a profit from it and Tesla’s history of questionable design decisions and quality issues, I’d potentially be interested in one. I like how it looks (although my aesthetic choices are certainly not everyone’s cup of tea,) and the specs are pretty impressive if they manage to deliver on them.

There’s a lot of hunger out there for more EV trucks, musk fanboys will gobble up anything he is involved in, and lots of people make questionable vehicle purchases, I think it will sadly sell just fine.