Fire Chief Marc Bashoor speaks with Division Chief Martha Ellis, executive director for the Public Safety Broadband Technology Association. Chief Ellis unpacks all things fireground communications, interoperability and FirstNet. She details the mission of the PSBTA and how FirstNet is currently serving the fire service. Contact Ellis here.
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A new cloud-native software suite links data and workflows from an initial 911 call all the way through the criminal justice system.
Motorola Solutions’ CommandCentral suite provides a complete incident view, including 911 call handling, dispatch, video analytics, field reports, records, evidence and community engagement. The automatic collection and correlation of incident data from every source — including bystanders’ smartphones, officers’ body-worn cameras, fixed video, 911 calls and radio logs — enhances collaboration and the building of case files…
As public agencies strive to upgrade technology in a national push, a San Diego-based company is positioning its new app as a way to help take pressure off hardworking emergency dispatchers.
That app, called Rescu, enables subscribers to get in touch with public agency emergency communication centers via the company’s own private dispatch professionals. In that sense, it shares some similarities with home alarm companies, and could potentially become more familiar to public agency dispatchers if the product catches on… READ MORE
Audrey Fraizer
Front stage at NAVIGATOR 2021 was a pitch far from EMD Nicole Janey’s stepping away from
a career in which she excelled and believed she would never leave.
But she did and came back again. Stronger.
Janey was an emergency dispatcher at the Boston Police Department, Massachusetts
(USA). She could dispatch the toughest of calls – the Boston Marathon bombing,
for example – and keep her cool knowing she was doing all she could to help. Sure,
some situations weighed more heavily on her than others but not to the extent
of the call convincing her to leave…
APCO 2021
The APCO 2021 conference is taking place in San Antonio this week. Many attendees come from the public-safety community or are involved in some way with public-safety communications. Many others are the people who make up public safety’s front-line, handling incoming calls from citizens and dispatching public-safety resources to a multiplicity of incidents around the United States. Once again, APCO has devoted an entire conference track to FirstNet.
FirstNet Authority RFI
According to an article in Urgent Communications, the FirstNet Authority has issued a Request For Information (RFI) concerning off-network communications, primarily Push-To-Talk (PTT) voice communications. As many readers know, I have been skeptical about the section of the 3GPP Mission-Critical Push-To-Talk (MCPTT) standard that attempts to address off-network broadband communications. Samsung’s MCPTT solution includes Proximity Services (ProSe) embedded in its chip. Motorola recently announced it will also offer 3GPP-compliant MCPTT capabilities later this year but these products will not include ProSe…
FirstNet is researching ways to provide off-network broadband communications to public-safety workers.
In some cases, responders must operate in remote areas with no access to broadband communications. They may be too far from network towers or base stations or fighting fires in buildings that have lost power and have intermittent cellular coverage.
The FirstNet Authority wants to better understand emerging technologies and potential capabilities for enabling not just device-to-device communications but also relay networks and a full range of data services, according to an Aug. 12 request for information. It wants responders to be able to share pictures, video, location or internet-of-things data with other responders, devices, drones and third-party applications without access to the macro network – the towers, base stations, cables and other physical facilities that provide communications…
