911? 9911?

On December 1, 2013, Kari Rene Hunt was murdered by her estranged husband. The murder took place in a hotel room in Marshall, Texas. One of the many tragic elements of this brutal crime was the fact that the attack on Ms. Hunt was witnessed by her young children. Seeing their mother in grave danger, the kids tried to call 9-1-1. But they had no luck reaching first responders, because the way that the hotel’s phone system was set up, an extra “9” needed to be dialed before a caller could reach an outside line.  This is something that Kari Hunt’s young kids would not have known.

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Mobility Policies

For the uninitiated, the acronym “BYOD” looks like a typo. But in the telecommunications context—and in the employment context, it stands for “bring your own device,” and it’s what’s happening all over as individuals opt to use their own devices rather than company-provided mobile phones or tablets.  The number of issues created when individuals bring their own devices into the enterprise is significant, particularly when the devices have at least two distinct uses/purposes/personalities—business and personal.  How should the enterprise reconcile these very different roles played by a single device?  Very, very carefully.

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Legal Considerations in DAS Deployment

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) are increasingly being deployed across communities—particularly in college and university communities. With this increased attention to the merits of DAS, it seemed timely to present a view of items for consideration, planning and ultimate deployment of DAS with particular attention to legal obligations and strategies for successful implementation.

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The Challenge of Providing Landline Service When Returns Diminish

Over the past few years, what started as a dull rumble about the abandonment of landlines by telecommunications companies (read: Verizon, CenturyLink and AT&T, among others) has grown into a medium roar.  Most recently, the Michigan and Colorado legislatures have been confronted with requests, driven by the telecommunications giants (insert “duh” here) to allow the existing, old, occasionally crumbling landline infrastructure to die a natural death in favor of other technologies, primarily those driven by the internet (VoIP, among others including WebRTC) as well as the plethora of wireless devices.

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Telephony Metadata and the Fourth Amendment

The firestorm created by Edward Snowden’s release of classified information earlier this year has forced at least some of the government’s “dirty little secrets” about its monitoring of both citizens and foreigners out into the open. This note will briefly examine the legal issues confronting both the National Security Agency (NSA) and FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court with respect to the release of telecommunications metadata to federal agencies.

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