https://urgentcomm.com/wp-content/themes/ucm_child/assets/images/logo/footer-logo.png
  • Home
  • News
  • Multimedia
    • Back
    • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
    • Galleries
  • Commentary
    • Back
    • Commentary
    • Urgent Matters
    • View From The Top
    • All Things IWCE
    • Legal Matters
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Resources
    • Events
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
    • Reprints & Reuse
  • IWCE
    • Back
    • IWCE
    • Conference
    • Special Events
    • Exhibitor Listings
    • Premier Partners
    • Floor Plan
    • Exhibiting Information
    • Register for IWCE
  • About Us
    • Back
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Advertisers
    • Terms of Service
    • Privacy Statement
    • Cookies Policy
  • Related Sites
    • Back
    • American City & County
    • IWCE
    • Light Reading
    • IOT World Today
    • Mission Critical Technologies
    • Microwave/RF
    • T&D World
    • TU-Auto
  • In the field
    • Back
    • In the field
    • Broadband Push-to-X
    • Internet of Things
    • Project 25
    • Public-Safety Broadband/FirstNet
    • Virtual/Augmented Reality
    • Land Mobile Radio
    • Long Term Evolution (LTE)
    • Applications
    • Drones/Robots
    • IoT/Smart X
    • Software
    • Subscriber Devices
    • Video
  • Call Center/Command
    • Back
    • Call Center/Command
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • NG911
    • Alerting Systems
    • Analytics
    • Dispatch/Call-taking
    • Incident Command/Situational Awareness
    • Tracking, Monitoring & Control
  • Network Tech
    • Back
    • Network Tech
    • Interoperability
    • LMR 100
    • LMR 200
    • Backhaul
    • Deployables
    • Power
    • Tower & Site
    • Wireless Networks
    • Coverage/Interference
    • Security
    • System Design
    • System Installation
    • System Operation
    • Test & Measurement
  • Operations
    • Back
    • Operations
    • Critical Infrastructure
    • Enterprise
    • Federal Government/Military
    • Public Safety
    • State & Local Government
    • Training
  • Regulations
    • Back
    • Regulations
    • Narrowbanding
    • T-Band
    • Rebanding
    • TV White Spaces
    • None
    • Funding
    • Policy
    • Regional Coordination
    • Standards
  • Organizations
    • Back
    • Organizations
    • AASHTO
    • APCO
    • DHS
    • DMR Association
    • ETA
    • EWA
    • FCC
    • IWCE
    • NASEMSO
    • NATE
    • NXDN Forum
    • NENA
    • NIST/PSCR
    • NPSTC
    • NTIA/FirstNet
    • P25 TIG
    • TETRA + CCA
    • UTC
Urgent Communications
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • News
  • Multimedia
    • Back
    • Video
    • Podcasts
    • Galleries
  • Commentary
    • Back
    • All Things IWCE
    • Urgent Matters
    • View From The Top
    • Legal Matters
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Events
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
    • Reprints & Reuse
    • UC eZines
  • IWCE
    • Back
    • Conference
    • Special Events
    • Exhibitor Listings
    • Floor Plan
    • Exhibiting Information
    • Register for IWCE
  • About Us
    • Back
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise
    • Terms of Service
    • Privacy Statement
    • Cookies Policy
  • Related Sites
    • Back
    • American City & County
    • IWCE
    • Light Reading
    • IOT World Today
    • Mission Critical Technologies
    • Microwave/RF
    • T&D World
    • TU-Auto
  • newsletter
  • In the field
    • Back
    • Internet of Things
    • Broadband Push-to-X
    • Project 25
    • Public-Safety Broadband/FirstNet
    • Virtual/Augmented Reality
    • Land Mobile Radio
    • Long Term Evolution (LTE)
    • Applications
    • Drones/Robots
    • IoT/Smart X
    • Software
    • Subscriber Devices
    • Video
  • Call Center/Command
    • Back
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • NG911
    • Alerting Systems
    • Analytics
    • Dispatch/Call-taking
    • Incident Command/Situational Awareness
    • Tracking, Monitoring & Control
  • Network Tech
    • Back
    • Cybersecurity
    • Interoperability
    • LMR 100
    • LMR 200
    • Backhaul
    • Deployables
    • Power
    • Tower & Site
    • Wireless Networks
    • Coverage/Interference
    • Security
    • System Design
    • System Installation
    • System Operation
    • Test & Measurement
  • Operations
    • Back
    • Critical Infrastructure
    • Enterprise
    • Federal Government/Military
    • Public Safety
    • State & Local Government
    • Training
  • Regulations
    • Back
    • Narrowbanding
    • T-Band
    • Rebanding
    • TV White Spaces
    • None
    • Funding
    • Policy
    • Regional Coordination
    • Standards
  • Organizations
    • Back
    • AASHTO
    • APCO
    • DHS
    • DMR Association
    • ETA
    • EWA
    • FCC
    • IWCE
    • NASEMSO
    • NATE
    • NXDN Forum
    • NENA
    • NIST/PSCR
    • NPSTC
    • NTIA/FirstNet
    • P25 TIG
    • TETRA + CCA
    • UTC
acc.com

NG-911


News

Kansas 911 organization selects AT&T, RapidDeploy to shift key PSAP solutions to the cloud

Kansas 911 organization selects AT&T, RapidDeploy to shift key PSAP solutions to the cloud

  • Written by Donny Jackson
  • 10th August 2019

Most public-safety answering points in Kansas are expected to process 911 calls with the help RapidDeploy’s the cloud-native Nimbus computer-aided-dispatch (CAD) system that will be deployed through an AT&T contract with the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council.

This marks the latest initiative by the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council to migrate PSAPs in the state to a next-generation 911 (NG911) architecture. In 2017, the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council became the first to contract with AT&T to build a statewide ESInet, the IP-network foundation for an NG911 system.

Similarly, Kansas now is the first state to announce that it will move the CAD operations in its member PSAPs—more than 80% of all PSAPs in the state, according to a press release—to the cloud, according to Scott Ekberg, director of the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council.

“When someone calls 911, it typically means something has gone terribly wrong,” Ekberg said in a prepared statement. “The caller—whether for themselves, a loved one or a stranger—can’t always articulate their location or vital details of the situation. That’s why we lean on technology to help us operate at our best and deliver the potentially life-saving services Kansans count on.

“We’ve long been a leader in NextGen 911 deployments, and we’re proud to be the first, major system to move our 911 solutions to the cloud. Our continued work with AT&T and the addition of the RapidDeploy Nimbus platform will further our ability to better serve Kansas residents should they ever need to call for help.”

For RapidDeploy, the Kansas announcement is the latest in a remarkable rise for the startup, which only introduced its cloud-based CAD system to the U.S. market two years ago.

RapidDeploy previously announced a two-year deal worth more than $6 million with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services 911 Emergency Communications Branch (Cal OES), but that arrangement is focused on mapping and analytics services. In contrast, the Kansas contract will represent the first large deployment of the cloud-based Nimbus CAD system announced to date in the U.S., according to RapidDeploy CEO Steve Raucher.

“This is really the blueprint of what we imagine NG911 will look like at a state level,” Raucher said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Kansas has an incredibly future-forward infrastructure, and the last piece of that infrastructure—to put it all together—is obviously hosted CAD and mapping.”

AT&T echoed that sentiment.

“We applaud the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council for its ongoing dedication to deliver an outstanding emergency response experience,” Stacy Schwartz, vice president for AT&T Public Safety & FirstNet, said in a prepared statement. “We’re proud to continue to evolve public-safety technology to help provide better information and enable enhanced decision-making among everyone involved in the public-safety process.

“Working with RapidDeploy, we’re helping unify critical 911 functions to boost speed, security and reliability between 911 call takers, dispatchers and first responders – all for the benefit of those they work tirelessly to help keep safe.”

RapidDeploy’s Raucher said that the first phase of the deployment—rolling out his company’s Radius tactical mapping platform, as well as support for two-way text and video—in 98 PSAPs across Kansas is scheduled to be completed early next year and will include the installation of the only hardware necessary to implement the RapidDeploy solutions. Raucher declined to provide a timeline for the Nimbus CAD deployment in Kansas but noted that the upgrade does not require a visit to the 911 centers, because the hardware already will be installed. This kind of flexibility is very different than the upgrade process of many legacy 911 solutions today, he said.

“What we’ve seen from our competitors is an average project time of 18 months to two years per PSAP,” Raucher said. “We’ve seen between nine months and 12 months for mapping projects. And it’s not uncommon to see the installation engineers walking around the PSAP with a floppy disk, installing the latest software on each machine.”

With a cloud-based solution like RapidDeploy, upgrades to the system can be made regularly with minimal disruption to operations in a PSAP. While such advantage to a cloud-based architecture have been utilized in enterprises for years, public safety has been slower to make the shift to the cloud, because of the risk that connectivity to the cloud could be lost and create downtime for the PSAP for a period of time.

By partnering with AT&T and Microsoft, RapidDeploy believes it has addressed such connectivity concerns, Raucher said.

“The problem that’s been holding public safety back—apart from the vendor community not having engineering solutions for the cloud—was obviously the connectivity piece, which was one of the reasons that we partnered with a great partner like AT&T,” Raucher said.

“AT&T has not only provided this ESInet solution statewide across Kansas, but it’s also providing the AT&T NetBond connection between the ESInet and the Microsoft Azure [Government] data center—that is an absolutely hardened, piece of private pipe from Microsoft’s data centers to AT&T’s core, through the core and out to the ESInet, giving five-9 connectivity from the PSAP directly into the data centers in the back end.”

In addition, this connectivity package is backed up by the LTE-based FirstNet system being deployed by AT&T, which represents a technological upgrade in comparison to the 3G wireless connections in Africa that RapidDeploy CAD technology originally was designed to leverage, Raucher said.

“Our entire platform is designed to run over 3G, let alone LTE,” he said. “If you look at who our solution partners are in this solution for Kansas, AT&T is bringing ESInet, it’s bringing NetBond into the Microsoft Azure [Government] data center, it’s bringing FirstNet out to responders in the field—and all of these are public-safety-grade solutions.

“I think that being able to be the final piece that sits in the middle of this is a very exciting prospect for RapidDeploy. Kudos to our solutions partners for giving us the toolset to be able to deliver an end-to-end public-safety solution.”

Raucher said he believes the Kansas announcement is indicative of a trend within the 911 industry and the public-safety community to embrace cloud-based solutions.

“We really are delivering a complete, future-proof platform for Kansas,” he said. “We’re again pushing the envelope and showing what can be done statewide … I think it’s an incredibly powerful message that being sent to the rest of the 911 authorities around America as everybody’s gearing up for 911 and what that means. What is achievable in a relatively short timeframe would have only been a dream—or a five-year project—even a few years ago

“We’re really, really proud to be a part of the story of the evolving face of NG911 in America.”

 

Tags: homepage-featured-4 Analytics Applications Companies Dispatch/Call-taking Enterprise Incident Command/Situational Awareness Long Term Evolution (LTE) News NG-911 NTIA/FirstNet Public Safety Public-Safety Broadband/FirstNet Regional Coordination Software State & Local Government System Design System Installation System Operation Tracking, Monitoring & Control Video News

Related


  • FLYMOTION: Ryan English demonstrates drone service with video, thermal-imaging capability during night responses
    Ryan English, president and co-founder of FLYMOTION Unmanned Systems, showcases the ability of the company’s drone service to provide traditional video and thermal-images to help public-safety personnel better understand their surroundings, even when responding in darkness.English spoke with IWCE’s Urgent Communications Editor Donny Jackson during the recent Operation Convergent Response (OCR) 2019 event in Perry, Ga., […]
  • Robotic Assistance Devices: Ioan Pop outlines benefits of robot prototype in airport environment
    Ioan Pop, vice president of engineering, describes features of Roameo, a prototype of a durable security-enhancement robot that can be customized to provide assorted forms of sensor data to airport security, as well as disseminate information via alerting, text or voice communications. Robotic Assistance Devices hopes to make the robot commercially available next year. Pop spoke […]
  • Newscan: ‘Spending like the Jetsons, living like the Flintstones’—the trouble with smart-city 5G
    Newscan: ‘Spending like the Jetsons, living like the Flintstones’—the trouble with smart-city 5G
    Web Roundup Items from other news organizations ‘Spending like the Jetsons, living like the Flintstones’—the trouble with smart-city 5G Senator blasts Amazon’s Ring doorbell as an ‘open door for privacy and civil-liberty violations’ Louisiana state government hit by ransomware attacks forcing server shutdowns New Jersey school district delays opening Monday after ransomware attacks FCC blocks […]
  • Group announces successful test of multi-vendor MCPTT call with end-to-end security
    Group announces successful test of multi-vendor MCPTT call with end-to-end security
    Secure voice communications can be delivered using 3GPP’s mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) standard across solutions provided by multiple vendors, according to tests recently announced by Bittium, Athonet, Nemergent and the Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) project. Fidel Liberal, coordinator for MCOP, said the testing—conducted this fall at the ETSI MCX plugtests event in Finland—is a big step […]

Leave a comment Cancel reply

To leave a comment login with your Urgent Comms account:

Log in with your Urgent Comms account

Or alternatively provide your name, email address below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • FCC adopts new rules for Z-axis vertical location of wireless 911 callers, but critics question their practical use
  • ZeroEyes: Kieran Carroll outlines capabilities of weapons-detection system built on existing cameras, AI
  • SES: Brady Spenrath highlights features of company's MEO satellite that delivers higher speeds, lower latency
  • VoltServer: Stephen Eaves highlights safety, efficiency benefits of digital electricity to support communications

Commentary


T-Mobile proposal of free 5G for public safety is a great idea, but there are a lot of caveats

15th November 2019

911 dispatch centers can take multiple steps to combat cyberattacks

15th November 2019

Proposed three-digit suicide-prevention ‘Lifeline’ would benefit public-safety communications

  • 1
4th October 2019
view all

Events


UC Ezines


IWCE 2019 Wrap Up

13th May 2019
view all

Twitter


UrgentComm

#IWCE2020 makes the list of best government conferences of 2020! Check out @GovLoop's article to find out why you d… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

11th December 2019
UrgentComm

The @FirstNetGov labs are evaluating not yet available #PPT #LTE devices. Firstnet Authority board members say thes… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

11th December 2019
UrgentComm

Our last #PTT and #futureofvoice webinar is tomorrow! Join us for the "Decision time: Balancing Investments in MCP… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

11th December 2019
UrgentComm

The CEO of @MotoSolutions said that FirstNet LTE is complementary to #LMR in response to their introduction of the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

10th December 2019
UrgentComm

Don't miss the "Next Generation Dispatching - What is the Future of Dispatch?" webinar on Dec 11 at 2 PM ET. Our ex… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

10th December 2019
UrgentComm

At OCR2019, Michael Quiroga, @flyasylon's chief revenue officer demos how their autonomous drone service includes a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

10th December 2019
UrgentComm

Terry Burnworth, president of @Pyramid_ACE1 explains the challenges that #911centers face as transitions from voice… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

9th December 2019
UrgentComm

President and co-founder of @FLYMOTIONmedia demonstrates the ability of the company's drone service to provide trad… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

9th December 2019

Newsletter

Sign up for UrgentComm’s newsletters to receive regular news and information updates about Communications and Technology.

Expert Commentary

Learn from experts about the latest technology in automation, machine-learning, big data and cybersecurity.

Business Media

Find the latest videos and media from the market leaders.

Media Kit and Advertising

Want to reach our digital and print audiences? Learn more here.

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • American City & County
  • IWCE
  • Light Reading
  • IOT World Today
  • Mission Critical Technologies
  • Microwave/RF
  • T&D World
  • TU-Auto

WORKING WITH US

  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Events
  • Careers

FOLLOW Urgent Comms ON SOCIAL

  • Cookies Policy
  • Privacy
  • Terms
Copyright ©2019 Informa PLC. Informa Telecoms & Media Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 00991704 whose registered office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG. VAT GB365462636. Informa Telecoms & Media Limited is part of Informa PLC.
Websites are now required by law to gain your consent before applying cookies. We use cookies to improve your browsing experience. Parts of the website may not work as expected without them. By closing or ignoring this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
X