Here's a scenario for you:

You have a work office in NYC, but travel to your company's LA facility for a team meeting. Still on east coast time, you get into the office before anyone else and fire up your PC. You connect and use your new VoIP softphone client to send and receive VoIP calls right through your PC -- allowing people to call (and receive calls from) your regular NYC office number.

Suddenly, you feel a sharp chest pain. Right before you black out, you are able to dial 911 through your PC softphone client.

So the question is, where do the police and ambulance show up? Unfortunately, if the above scenario did happen, police would very possibly not be routed to the company's LA office.

This is just one of several insights I learned from talking to Mark Fletcher, Nortel's e911 expert and also the chairman of the multi-line telephone system subcommittee for NENA. Just last week, U.S. President George Bush signed the "New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008," which is meant to help ensure VoIP-based 911 calls are more easy to locate.

However, as Mark explained to me and also in this Nortel feature article, "the technical capability to program location-specific information into each employee phone already exists now in most enterprise equipment deployed over the past few years." According to Mark, "the enterprise VoIP emergency response issue is often a result of low priority on IT 'to do' lists because just how serious a threat this is to the safety of employees isn't really appreciated until something goes wrong."

Today in No Jitter, Mark has this guest post that focuses on the possible huge liability for enterprises who don't take e911 safety seriously. Mark has also been busy creating a series of e911 videos on Nortel's YouTube channel. You can see the entire series here. Below is one of his videos that provides an overview of how e911 works.