Minnesota Residents on Small Carriers - Text-to-911 Working?

Text-to-911, does it work for you or not In Minnesota you’re supposed to be able to text 911 if you are disabled and can’t talk. The official line is simple: “Call if you can, text if you can’t.” I can’t call, but yet I can't text either. The company that is my internet provider told me the NextGen 911 upgrades omitted the texting part. So what’s actually going on? Text-to-911 was sold to Minnesota as a critical backup. It’s for people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or speech impaired. It’s for anyone in a situation where making a sound could get them hurt. A few examples are… Domestic violence. Home invasion. Being told not to call. Among others. If you go to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety website right now, Text-to-911 is still listed as available statewide. They say it’s been working since December 2017. They talk about tens of thousands of texts being processed. They frame NextGen 911 as an improvement that will make text, location, photos, and video work better, not as something that omitted the existing texting service. So which is it? A phone company tells a customer the upgrade omitted texting. The state keeps advertising it like nothing’s wrong. Local news covers at least one person who can’t use it. And there’s no clear public explanation that closes the gap. Text-to-911 exists for the exact moments when voice is not an option. If it fails for some carriers or some areas while the official message is “it’s available,” people are left thinking they have a backup, when in fact, that it may not actually be there when they need it. After some investigation, I found out that this may be a state-wide problem. The reason I'm saying this is because I have reached out to three Internet providers, just to see if they were able to use the Text-to-911. No one was able to make it work. The quick fix was to have a dedicated cell phone in the emergency services 911 center used for texting until the state 911 system is fixed. Here’s what should happen. The local 911 centers and the state’s Emergency Communication Networks division should test Text-to-911 from the local telephone companies numbers in the areas that are having problems and publish the results. If certain carriers or regions have degraded service, people deserve clear public notice instead of a website that still says everything is fine. Until then, if you live in an area served by a smaller carrier, don’t assume texting 911 will work just because the state says it does. Save your county’s 10-digit non-emergency dispatch number in your phone, which was the solution for my predicament. Test carefully if you need to, and document what happens. If you’ve tried texting 911—especially on a rural or independent phone company—and it failed or it worked, I want to hear about it. This shouldn’t be something individual people have to discover the hard way. The backup system that was supposed to be there for people who can’t talk wasn’t working for me, the company that provides internet service says a upgrade to the state 911 system broke it, and the official story hasn’t caught up. That's why I decided to do this episode, because I'm tired of people not looking at the bigger picture when they plan important things.