It certainly been an arduous couple of weeks lately. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and the monthly bills all hitting at the same time certainly caused quite a stir. If you listen to my podcast last week, you'll know that I gave up my nice recording studio for the simplistic, yet functional, front seat of my Jeep. A good 120V inverter, Wi-Fi conductivity, and remote access to the Avaya network let me do my job, even if my connectivity was somewhat reduced.

These past few weeks got me thinking about E9-1-1 in both the enterprise space and public safety, and the correlation of emergent events. With so many devices that are mobile today, in addition to the increased number of individuals that can report and emergent event simultaneously, their mobility opens up the geographic area that events can be reported from.

Because of this, 911 centers, or PSAP's, can quickly become overloaded. You probably have read the stories in the news where thousands of callers were blocked when they called 911 from their wireless devices in the middle of a storm or other emergent event. When you look at the actual incident though, it becomes quite clear that the bulk of the blockage was between the carrier network and the public safety agencies.

The knee-jerk reaction to correct that issue, is to put in more trunks. Simple, right? On the surface, this may seem so. However, even with more trunks, calls would still go unanswered if the number of public safety call takers is not increased as well. Putting in more trunks between the carrier and the PSAP just moves the bottleneck further down the line.

Lets look at the math:

• 14 Call Takers in a Center
• Average Length of a E911 Call is 1 1/2 minutes 90 seconds
• Each Call Taker can answer 40 calls in an hour
• The E911 Center as a whole can answer 560 calls per hour
• If 1000 people call 911 in an hour, nearly HALF would not get answered
• Double that to 2000 calls in an hour, and a staggering 75% don't get through

This is where the correlation of emergent events that are geographically close to each other can provide a better picture to a particular situation without overloading the network. One example that I can give you in the enterprise, is a fire in a high-rise building. If someone sees the fire and smoke before it's detected by sensors in the building, the initial call into 911 will be someone verbally reporting a fire. This creates an incident in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. Subsequent calls from the same location could then be treated differently than calls from other locations.

With Next Generation 911, detailed information about the location of the caller can also be sent, and analyzed, by the PSAP prior to assigning that call to a call taker. Intelligent building information from an alarm system in the building can also provide valuable data such as smoke detector activation or heat sensors providing public safety with a better view of the incident.

So based on my example, 20 or 30 people or more could call 911, and through the intelligent correlation of information about each communication session, or the user initiating that session, can provide great detail to public safety that allows them to prioritize or triage much more intelligently. This functionality allows supervisors to better manage their resources and get help to the public as quickly as possible.

Now I want to be perfectly clear here. I'm not saying that you're less of a priority when you call 911, and someone else from your building has already called. What I'm saying is, if I know about an event at your location, and I have 20 calls in queue yet to be answered, logic will depict that calls from locations, where I'm not actively working in incident, have a higher probability of being a new emergent event. And calls with the same location identifier as a current event, have a higher probability of being an event I already know about.

This all boils down to event correlation at the PSAP, in the enablement of NG 911 services in the enterprise that can provide valuable data points to public safety on emergent events. Next Generation 911 deployment within public safety is well underway in several areas around the country. I don't think there's an RFP on the street today that doesn't have specific language around Next Generation 911 requirements.

Many enterprise businesses are also asking about Next Generation 911. They're starting remediation of the E9-1-1 services in their large corporate environments. What they don't want to do, is by someone's "fire sale technology". More and more businesses want to be NG 911 compliant internally now, knowing that once NG 911 services are available in their area, it's a simple SIP trunking connection to allow the intelligent data flow between what I call the Emergency Location Management server in the DMZ, and the intelligent public safety i3 NG 911 network.

So, to answer the question that I get asked almost every single day;

"When will NG 911 be here?"

"The box is on your front doorstep. You need to bring inside, and turn it on"

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Until next week. . . dial carefully.