New Generation of Technologies Sometimes Scary for Public Safety Agencies
LAS VEGAS -- Public safety’s main focus on 911 is to move emergency calling into the 21st century, said National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes during a presentation at the CES Monday. But Trey Forgety, head of government affairs at NENA, warned that public safety remains conservative and slow to change.
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"More than 60 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers right now have smartphone devices and that number is growing rapidly,” Fontes said. “You're able to push and pull data, take pictures, video and transmit them to your friends, and you do not have that capability to do so with 911.”
Current-generation 911 has three capabilities, Forgety said. “We can take a voice call,” he said. “We can get your location from [a] database if you're a wireline subscriber and we can get your location from a cellular network if you're a cellular subscriber and … we can get your telephone number to call you back. That’s pretty much all that 911 does right now.” Call takers for 911 want access to photographs, videos, medical records, building maps and other files, Forgety said. “We want to have standards-based ways to get that in the front door,” he said. “If they at least know that something is available, they can make an intelligent decision about what do I need to look at so I get a better public safety outcome.”
Call takers also need more reliable access to location information, Forgety said. “Location is the fundamental thing that we absolutely have to have in order to make public safety responses work. We've got to know where to send the ambulance, where to send the fire truck, where to send the police car."
Fontes said there’s a strong “nexus” between making FirstNet work once it launches and pushing 911 call centers into an IP world. Next-generation 911 will be more efficient than “the last century” technology now in use at public safety answering points, though where the money will come from to pay for this change is the “$64 million question,” he said. “The whole issue of funding for 911 is going through a rethink, if you will."
For public safety agencies, this new world is sometimes “very scary,” Forgety said. “Public safety is very conservative. We tend to look askance at any new thing that comes along.” Public safety isn’t used to the new interest in emergency calling by app developers and the consumer electronics industry, he said.
Vish Nandlall, chief technology officer at Ericsson North America, said the biggest network trend today is the coming together of data and computing. “How will I get compute and data on top of one another, so I don’t have to move data and put it on top of compute?” he said. “That’s the design paradigm that’s going to really shape the industry over the next 10 years or so.” The “end game” is “big data,” he said.