Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://orbit-docs.devotel.io/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Emergency Calling

Orbit does not support emergency calling. Any outbound call to 911 (US/Canada), 112 (EU and most of the world), 999 (UK / Ireland / Hong Kong / several others), or 000 (Australia) is rejected before it reaches a carrier.If you or someone with you needs emergency help, dial 911 / 112 / 999 / 000 from a regular mobile or landline phone. Orbit’s internet-routed calls cannot deliver your location to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).

What gets blocked

Every outbound voice send is run through the same dial-plan matcher (packages/shared/src/utils/emergency-dial.ts) before it reaches billing, the trunk, or the carrier. The matcher strips formatting, trunk prefixes, and country codes, then compares the survivor against the blocked short-code set. The blocked short codes today:
CodeUsed in
911United States, Canada
112EU, UK, Israel, India, most of the world (mobile fallback)
999UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, several others
000Australia
The matcher also rejects these variants of the same dial:
  • Bare digits: 911, 112
  • With + prefix: +911, +112
  • With NANP country code: 1911, +1911, 1-911
  • With trunk prefix: 0112, 00112, 011911
  • Formatted: (911), 9-1-1, 9 1 1
Real phone numbers that happen to start with these digit sequences (for example +19115551234) are not blocked — the matcher’s length guard only collapses prefixes when the survivor’s length equals an emergency short code.

What you see when a call is blocked

Every layer of Orbit’s stack — the API send-voice endpoint, the voice-gateway dispatcher, and the Jambonz dial-plan router — returns the same stable error code so your integration can branch on it without string-matching a localised message.
{
  "error": {
    "code": "EMERGENCY_CALLING_NOT_SUPPORTED",
    "message": "Emergency calls are not supported on this service. Dial 911 from a landline or mobile phone.",
    "status": 422,
    "details": {
      "to": "+1911****",
      "emergency_code": "911",
      "docs_url": "https://docs.orbit.devotel.io/voice/emergency-calling"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "request_id": "req_abc123",
    "timestamp": "2026-05-14T00:00:00Z"
  }
}
The HTTP status is 422 Unprocessable Entity. The block fires pre-flight: no carrier dispatch happens, no per-minute cost is billed, and no PSAP is contacted. The audit log captures the attempt with a redacted destination (+1911****) for security review.
Branch on error.code === "EMERGENCY_CALLING_NOT_SUPPORTED" — never on the human-readable message. The message is localised at the dashboard layer and may change.

Why E911 is not supported

E911 (Enhanced 911) routing requires three things Orbit does not offer: PSAP-aware trunking (calls must land at the correct Public Safety Answering Point for the caller’s physical location); Registered Location Information (US FCC rules require the caller’s dispatchable address be provisioned in the NENA i3 ESInet before any 911 call is placed); and real-time location updates for browser, mobile-app, and SIP-trunk callers whose physical location is not stable. Orbit is treated as a non-interconnected VoIP service under FCC classification and is therefore not subject to the E911 mandate — but is also barred from offering 911 service without meeting the full E911 obligations.

Operator obligations

If your product surfaces a softphone, an agent call flow, or any interface that lets a human originate calls, you must disclose this limitation. Tell users at sign-up that the service does not place emergency calls. When EMERGENCY_CALLING_NOT_SUPPORTED comes back, render a clear “Call 911 from a regular phone” message — do not retry silently. Recommend the user’s mobile or landline phone for emergencies, and surface this prominently if your product is medical or safety-related. Orbit captures every rejected attempt in your audit log with a redacted destination; keep these for compliance review.
Outbound voice is also subject to TCPA quiet-hours enforcement (invariant #68) — US federal law (47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(B)) prohibits autodialled or pre-recorded calls outside 8 AM–9 PM in the recipient’s local time. This gate is a hard guard for US destinations and cannot be disabled per-tenant. When the recipient’s timezone cannot be resolved (no NANP area-code hit, no contact-level timezone field, no country-level fallback), behaviour depends on the org’s unknown_timezone_policy setting:
ValueBehaviour
skip (default)Allow the call. TCPA only applies to US recipients; unknown-tz destinations are presumed non-US.
enforce_utcEvaluate the call against the UTC clock — 8 AM–9 PM UTC. Strict orgs (typically EU operators) lock this on.
Set the policy under Settings → Compliance → Quiet hours.

Roadmap

E911 / PSAP-aware emergency routing is on the platform roadmap but not yet shipped. If your use case requires it (security-monitoring, medical-alert, fleet-dispatch), please contact support@devotel.io — we maintain a notification list for the feature’s GA. Until then: dial emergency services from a regular mobile or landline phone. Orbit cannot help in an emergency.