Time for change

It's a train that industry insiders agree needs to leave the station as quickly as possible, because the technological landscape has been altered dramatically since the 911 system was established more than 40 years ago — a time when wireline telephony was the only communications option for emergency callers.

Today, most 911 calls originate from mobile phones, a significant amount come from voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers, and there is a recognized need for PSAPs to be able to accept text messages from emergency callers — driven by the fact that the hearing-impaired community largely is abandoning the legacy TTY technology and the general public has become increasingly comfortable with text messaging.

Changes to the legacy 911 system are possible, but they tend to happen slowly and are very expensive, as the migration to wireless E-911 proved. However, by moving to the all-IP architecture of NG-911, PSAPs should be able to adapt to the ever-evolving telecommunications landscape more quickly, and with much less difficulty and expense.

From a technological perspective, the movement to NG-911 largely is ready to take place. While some in the 911 industry criticized some of the initial NENA standards work associated with the next-generation network architecture — known as i3 — as lacking necessary detail, those issues largely have been resolved. Hixson said a second version of i3 is expected to be released by the end of the year, and work is being done on a third version of i3 to address further changes in the telecommunications landscape.

Although NG-911 standards constantly will evolve to reflect changes in technology, Hixson said that the physical aspects of the system are "pretty well tied down at this point," allowing vendors and PSAPs to make investments in next-gen equipment with little fear that the gear will have to be replaced because it will be obsolete in the near future.

With a more-detailed framework, vendors have enough information to develop products for NG-911, and much of this hardware and software is finding its way into initial deployments. According to Stephen Meer, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intrado, though the migration toward NG-911 has not "seen a tipping point by any stretch of the imagination yet," significant progress has been made over the last year, on several fronts.

"Rollouts continue, and people are signing deals for projects, so we're seeing groundswell happen," Meer said. "I think the broad public-safety community has woken up to the fact that they need to do something other than just read the articles about it and need to start contemplating what the realities to them may be."

One of the more notable deployments is in the state of Vermont, where IP connectivity installed last year has led to a six-month trial of text-to-911 capability throughout the state for all Verizon Wireless customers, said David Tucker, executive director of the Vermont Enhanced 911 Board that oversees functionality for the state's eight PSAPs.

In addition to the text trial, the Vermont system supports advanced 911 call-routing in the core and advanced network-based CPE deployment, Meer said.

"They have a lot of attributes of next-gen rocking and rolling, and they don't have any stranded investment," Meer said. "As call traffic starts coming to them in different ways, or we add in video feeds or pictures, it's a matter of adding on instead of replacing.

"So I think that Vermont is a great example of somebody who got it right. They bit off the piece they needed to deal with, they laid out a framework to move forward, and they have meaningful, usable benefits for them today. It's not like they just moved the same old stuff to IP and didn't add any functionality."