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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).

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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: 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.

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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.
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.

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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.

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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. If the org has not set an explicit policy, the default is channel- and recipient-dependent:
  • Outbound voice to a US (NANP +1) recipient fails closed — the default is deny, so the call is blocked. TCPA quiet-hours is a hard guard for US voice, so an unresolvable timezone on a US number cannot be presumed safe.
  • Every other case (non-voice channels, or a recipient presumed non-US) defaults to skip — the send is allowed, since TCPA does not apply.
Set the policy under Settings → Compliance → Quiet hours.

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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.