by AllThingsECC.com | Sep 1, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
How the Nation’s Most Important Wireless Network was Born
“First responders from other states headed to New York and Washington, D.C. While their assistance was welcomed, their presence further complicated the communications conundrum.”
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Chief Chuck Dowd pulled up to the security gate at the New York City 9-1-1 Center where he was commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s communications division. An officer told him that a small plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center buildings. While the news concerned him, he had no idea what he was about to walk into.
“I went into the 9-1-1 Center and the place was a madhouse,” Dowd said. “As you can imagine, the calls were coming in from everywhere and they were horrific. Our folks were talking to people in the buildings who they knew were not going to get out alive. It was a terrible time.”
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by ECC Editor | Aug 30, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Empty cow pastures on one day can be bustling with hundreds of firefighters the next as fire camps with colorful tent cities spring up.
More than 20,000 wildland firefighters are battling some 100 large wildfires in the U.S. West, and truckloads of supplies and equipment are needed to keep them effective at fighting flames for weeks on end.
“We’ll set up a small village,” said Evans Kuo, a “Type 1” incident commander assigned to the nation’s biggest and most dangerous wildfires. His incident command team has 44 members. “The main idea of the camp is to not only house the incident command team, but also house the base camp that has food, water, sleeping and showers.” … READ MORE
by AllThingsECC.com | Aug 30, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
Mutualink recently announced the launch of LNK360, a revamp of its interoperability software platform that includes new features and an architecture that is designed to improve both resiliency and flexibility, according to Mutualink Chairman and CEO Mark Hatten.
“Products evolve, especially in the software world. You get to a point in the evolution of your product that you learn that it might be better to start over, in a sense, with the product than to keep adding to it,” Hatten said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.,,
by AllThingsECC.com | Aug 27, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
Those responsible for managing their organization’s E911 strategy face the following new challenges:
- The shift to remote and hybrid work means that employees are largely no longer working from a fixed location.
- The increase in the adoption of softphones changes the way individuals make calls, potentially creating more difficulty in reaching a 911 operator, especially for home-based employees.
- Employees are more reliant on their mobile devices for making phone calls than ever before.
- On-premises PBXs are rapidly going away as organizations increase their use of UCaaS.
- UCaaS, coupled with bring-your-own-carrier for PSTN connectivity, adds additional management complexity in ensuring 911 call routing and location management…
by ECC Editor | Aug 26, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
The Arkansas 911 Board has selected AT&T to implement its “Next Generation 9-1-1 service” to improve emergency communications across the state.
The state’s 114 public safety answering points (PSAPs) handle more than 1.6 million 9-1-1 calls each year. Terms of the contract were not disclosed.
Some aspects of the new service include:
- Improved location-based services. Using location-based geospatial routing, when a person contacts 9-1-1, their location can be identified quickly and routed to the appropriate PSAP for improved response times… READ MORE
by AllThingsECC.com | Aug 26, 2021 | Articles, Comm Center News
Introduction
The imminent release of Motorola’s 3GPP-compliant (sans ProSe) Push-To-Talk (PTT) will be the second 3GPP-compliant PTT application available on FirstNet (Built with AT&T). With seven other PTT applications already approved for the network, I am concerned about how we progress from today where we have a variety of flavors of PTT to where we need to be with fully-interoperable push-to-talk for FirstNet and integration with multiple forms of Land Mobile Radio systems (LMR).
Last week, I wrote about the FirstNet Authority’s request for information concerning off-network communications. Response to that article was greater than to any I have written in the past three to four months. Most of the comments were positive and many brought up some of the same issues I wrote about…
