Florida county realizes benefits of integrated text-to-911 capability

Creating an intuitive environment for telecommunicators was a primary goal as technical personnel designed the VESTA SMS solution, according to Flynn Nogueira, director of marketing for Airbus DS Communications.

“We’re excited about the fact that the way the call-taker answers a text call with VESTA SMS on the VESTA 911 system is just like they answer and process a voice call,” Nogueira said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “That’s why we spent so much time putting that platform in place, so that it would become seamless to the call-taker and make it as easy as possible. The PSAP wouldn’t have to do a whole new set of training, and it would be a lot easier and intuitive to the call-taker—that’s what we’re really striving for.”

Such an approach is particularly important as public safety takes steps toward next-generation 911 platforms that will allow PSAPs to receive multimedia—text, pictures, data and video—from the public and from first responders leveraging FirstNet and commercial broadband services, according to Finney.

“The person in the middle that makes that successful or not successful is who? The 911 call-takers and dispatchers in the PSAP,” Finney said. “We’re going to bombard them, if we don’t do it [right]. If the industry partners don’t come up with efficient, effective ways to do it, it’s not going to work.

“I’ve been very happy with Airbus’s approach in this, to look at it from the standpoint of person sitting in the seat and how this works for them, because failure or success on anything is going to depend on how they handle the incident as it comes in.”

These IP-enabled capabilities also create new operational questions for PSAP administrators, in terms of resource allocation, according to Finney.

“We have it set up where all agents in a pool can receive a text message, and our choice has been to restrict them to a single text message,” he said. “You could have it where a person could continue to receive 911 [voice] calls while they’re handling a text message. We’ve chosen not to right now and just allow them to deal with one session. I think some of new generation could take a voice call and a text session—maybe two text sessions—but right now, we’ve chosen just to do one.

“There are a lot of questions. There are not standards or best practices out there … The call volumes with text are so much lower, we can kind of experiment with it. That may not be what we do going forward, but right now, that’s what we’ve chosen to do.”