Counties of Southern Illinois (CSI) begin operations on next-gen 911 system provided by NG-911 Inc.

Coincidentally, the final PSAP in the CSI next-gen 911 system went live just days before new a new Illinois law was passed that revamped 911 funding and requires all PSAPs in the state to deploy next-gen 911 system within five years.

“Now, the rest of the state is going to have an easier path [from a regulatory standpoint], except for paying for it, because we got most of our project paid for with federal grant money,” Smith said. “They’re not going to have that same advantage, but they’re not going to have to fight the regulatory fight that we did.

“The fact that we did it early meant that there were a whole lot of headaches for us, but now we’re sitting here with an operational system, while everyone else is scrambling.”

From a technical standpoint, CSI’s biggest challenge was preparing geographic information systems (GIS) data to properly address locations within each of the counties’ jurisdictions, Smith said.

“There’s a huge difference between your data being good enough to display on a map in your PSAP and your data being good enough that, when you combine it with 12 other counties’ data, you can accurately route calls when there are 27 ‘Main Streets’ in the region,” he said. “The wireless calls have been routing nearly perfectly from the beginning; the problem was some of the landline calls that were super duplicated.

“I’ve got five towns with numbered streets in my county, and so does everybody else. So, over 13 counties, you’ve got 60 different towns with a ‘First Street.’ Getting the system to recognize which town and which county, so that it routed it to the right place, was challenging. And, is it ‘First,’ as in ‘F-I-R-S-T’ or is it ‘1-S-T’? Is it a street or avenue? And it’s on the roads data, the structure data, the MSAG layer … there are five places where it had to match exactly.”

Once again, the cash-strapped CSI counties did this GIS work internally.

“We couldn’t afford to pay some Geo-Comm-type company to come in and do it for us—each of the 911 coordinators in our region did it themselves,” Smith said, noting that CSI was fortunate that a couple of CSI officials had significant educational background in the field and were able to help others in the group.

From a functionality standpoint, the biggest immediate difference for the CSI counties is the fact that the new next-gen 911 system is fully redundant and enables greater flexibility in handling large surges in call volume, Smith said.

“We are currently geo-spatially routing calls, answering them and backing them up—to me, that’s one of the biggest advantages,” Smith said. “We’re in tornado alley and in an earthquake zone. If there is a major disaster in a county that only has two positions, they’re overwhelmed immediately. Now, instead of having two people to answer the phone, all of the other calls that would be getting busy signals have 39 positions to answer them.”

In its next phase, CSI plans to integrate text-to-911 services into the system—a capability that is much more practical by leveraging the scale of the 13 member counties, Smith said.

“It doesn’t make sense for a single small county that only gets 30 911 calls per day to pay for a separate connection for text, when they’re only going to get one per month,” he said. “But, by working it all together, we can afford the solution and collectively—among 13 counties—we’ll get enough text calls to make it worth paying for.”

In the future, the CSI next-gen 911 system technically will be able to support photos and video being sent to PSAPs, Smith and Lovett said.

CSI members that have migrated to the next-gen 911 system are the counties of Jackson, Saline, Gallatin, Union, Williamson, Johnson, Pulaski, Alexander, Clay, Richland, Wabash and White, as well as the city of Marion, according to a press release.