Florida county makes transition to NG 911
Intrado announced that Charlotte County, Fla., recently launched a next-generation 911 system that leverages the vendor’s technology. The IP-based system will allow the county’s public-safety answering point to receive high-bandwidth files — such as building floor plans, digital photos and video — that are sent to them from wireless 911 callers. Perhaps more important is that the platform will let the PSAP receive 911 texts.
“The younger generation has come to expect the ability to text with their cell phones; it’s what they do day in and day out,” said Mark Scott, the company’s vice president and general manager. “But they don’t understand how legacy 911 functions. They text to 911 and they think that help is going to come. They believe that they can send a picture, like they do to their friends, and 911 will receive it. In reality, none of those applications exist in the legacy world.”
The ability to send text messages to PSAPs also is important for the hearing impaired, many of whom are abandoning their TTD/TTY devices, said Mary Boyd, Intrado’s vice president of marketing strategy.
“People today are highly mobile, and they often don’t have the means to take those devices with them,” Boyd said.
However, PSAPs only can receive texts from wireless 911 callers when carriers make such service available. So far, only one PSAP in the country actually can receive wireless 911 texts — in Black Hawk County, Iowa — but Boyd expects that to change over time.
“This is no different than any other historical 911 implementation. It will take time to get the adoption rate up — it just takes planning,” Boyd said. “This is no different than the early days of wireless Phase 1 and Phase 2 adoption. There were early systems that went in, and then the rest of the country started the migration.”
NG-911 systems also provide “meat-and-potatoes” applications, such as enhanced call-routing, that are vitally important, according to Scott. He used as an example a multi-car accident on a major freeway that happens at about the same time as a nearby resident is having a heart attack. Without enhanced call-routing, network congestion as a result of the car accident could prevent the heart-attack victim’s call from reaching the PSAP.
“We know that after the first four or five calls related to the accident, the incremental information received from the call-taker isn’t a lot of help,” Scott said. “So, to prevent the heart-attack victim from receiving a fast-busy because the circuits are jammed, or being placed on hold for 45 minutes, we can use enhanced call-routing to put a header on the front of the call that says, ‘If you’re calling about the traffic accident, press one, if you’re calling about anything else, press two.’ So, the accident calls get placed into queue, and the heart-attack victim immediately goes to the call-taker.”
