California expects 8 PSAPs to make NG911 transition this year, more in 2023

Eight of California’s 450 public-safety answering points (PSAPs) have migrated at least some emergency calls from legacy 911 technology to a next-generation 911 (NG911) platform, and the number of 911 centers making a similar transition should increase in 2023.

Paul Troxel, chief of the 911 program-management division for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), told members of the State 911 Advisory Board that there have been some challenges associated with legacy call-processing equipment (CPE) that have limited the planned rollout of IP-based NG911 systems.

“So, this year—2022—we’re down to eight successful deployments and installations,” Troxel said during the Nov. 16 meeting of the advisory board. “Those have been works in progress.”

Troxel said that the NG911 deployment team—buoyed in large part by the testing and certification work being done by the state’s NG911 laboratory—has developed a “workaround” solution to the legacy-CPE issue. Troxel expressed confidence that the pace of NG911 deployment across California will accelerate next year, as more PSAPs have indicated interest in making the move to the IP-based NG911 platform that supports voice, text, data and video communications.

“We do have a quite a few agencies who are pushing to go to cloud CPE,” Troxel said. “We have a couple of active deployments, and then we have a bunch of PSAPs contacting the team, requesting their updated allotment letters and [asking] what the process is.

“In 2023, we do expect deployments to go up and take less time.”

At the heart of the “workaround” solution to the legacy-CPE problem is a box that emulates the Automatic Location Identification (ALI) function that is used in legacy 911 system, but the new approach provides NG911 location information—typically more accurate than location data from a legacy system—into the legacy CPE.

“One of the challenges that we’ve found is that the CPE cannot take an NG911 location and push it through the CPE to the CAD,” Troxel said.

“This ALI-emulation box will bring next-gen location in, deliver it through a serial port down through to the CAD system. It will allow that legacy CPE to display location [and] display the number information to give the dispatchers the information that they need. They can push it to CAD and continue the call forward.”

Troxel noted that a technician would have to make a site visit to a PSAP to install the ALI-emulation box.

Budge Currier, chairman of the 911 advisory board, said the ALI-emulation solution has been tested and is being used.

“Imperial County and El Dorado County have these today, and they’re working on the network as we speak today,” Currier said during the board meeting.

This ALI-emulation box also is being used in Tuolomne County, where the first PSAPs were migrated to NG911 technology, according to Troxel.

“In Tuolomne County, … they have T-Mobile, Verizon, Frontier landline and AT&T Mobility on an NG911 network,” he said. “I believe that accounts for about 90% of their workload, which is on NG911 today and working.

“The ALI-emulation box has been installed there for quite some time, and it is working.”

Troxel emphasized the contributions of the state NG911 lab to test and validate the performance of equipment like CPE being used with the NG911 system.

“When we purchased our CPE, we purchased with the requirement that met the NENA i3 standard,” Troxel said. “When that contract was signed in 2017, there was no NG911 lab to validate that. Now, we do have an NG911 lab, and it allows us to do some testing.

We’re finding limitations to the legacy call-processing equipment where it does not meet the i3-compliance [requirement]. That has created a big challenge for our team and our NG911 service providers, [forcing them] to take a look at how do we deliver a 911 call to legacy solutions.”