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It was set up in 1968 in the United States, but was not applicable to the whole country until the early 1980s.
In over 99% of locations in the United States and Canada, dialing "911" from any telephone will link the caller to an emergency dispatch center which can send emergency responders to the caller's location in an emergency. In some areas enhanced 911 is available, which automatically gives dispatch the caller's location, if available.
When the 9-1-1 system was originally introduced, it was advertised as the "nine-eleven" service. This cause some problems when people looked for the "eleven" key on their telephones. Therefore, all references to the telephone number 9-1-1 are now always made as nine-one-one—never as nine-eleven (See September 11, 2001 attacks).
Dialing 911 from a mobile phone will reach the state police or highway patrol. The caller will have to describe his or her exact location so that the state police can transfer the call to the correct local emergency services. It is therefore more efficient to store into the mobile phone the direct phone number to the local police or other emergency services.
If 911 is dialed from a commercial VoIP service, depending on how the provider handles such calls, the call may not go anywhere at all, or it may go to a non-emergency number at the public safety answering point associated with the billing or service address of the caller. Because a VoIP adapter can be plugged into any broadband internet connection, the caller could actually be hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home, yet if the call goes to an answering point at all, it would be the one associated with the caller's address and not the actual location. It may never be possible to accurately pinpoint the exact location of a VoIP user, so users should be aware of this limitation and make other arrangements for summoning assistance in an emergency.
The number's close association with emergency situations has led to "911" being used as shorthand for "emergency" in text messages sent to pagers and mobile phones. Additionally, 911 is used so pervasively in US media that other countries have sometimes had difficulty in educating children not to dial 911 for help. For example, the UK number is 9-9-9, the European and GSM number is 1-1-2, the Australian number is 0-0-0, and the Japanese numbers are 1-1-0 for the police and 1-1-9 for other emergencies.
9-1-1 Emergency Telephone Number Day was proclaimed, by President Reagan in 1987, to occur on the 11th day of September, the ninth month, of that year. The proclamation was made to promote the North American universal emergency telephone number 9-1-1.
Since then has been celebrated by many United States communities as "9-1-1 emergency number day" or simply "911 day". The promotional effort is often lead by firefighters and the Police.9-1-1 Emergency Telephone Number Day