Wired reports on progress in the US on E911 legislation which requires mobile operators to pass the location of emergency calls to the emergency services. Despite a 2005 deadline most providers it appears are only now getting to the position where location data is available and unlike in Europe the route adopted has been through the use of GPS enabled phones, rather than network based analysis.
For the benefit of public safety the faster this and the equivalent E112 rules in Europe are met the better, but remember this will also provide a major boost to the reawakening LBS market.
As I have noted before however knowing where you are is only part of the answer for the development of the LBS market, we still need richer geospatial databases and most importantly really compelling applications.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.