Nebraska Contracts With RapidSOS to Boost 911 Capability

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(TNS) — Every emergency dispatch center in Nebraska will soon be equipped with new technology that will ensure dispatchers are able to quickly connect with 911 callers even if 911 services are disrupted by an outage — as they have been repeatedly in recent months.

Nebraska regulators signed a five-year, $1.32 million contract last week with public safety technology provider RapidSOS to outfit the state’s 67 dispatch centers with the company’s premium “UNITE” service, which the company unveiled last month and is set to install across Nebraska in the next few months.

The state will pay $264,000 per year for the service, which RapidSOS is providing to Nebraska at a discounted rate, according to its contract with state regulators. At full price, the installation and annual operating costs would have cost the state $3.65 million over the life of the contract — more than three times what the state is set to pay for the technology.

The software promises to bring a suite of new capabilities to 911 centers from Blair to Bridgeport, but most urgently, the technology will streamline dispatchers’ ability to retrieve crucial data — including a wireless caller’s phone number and exact location — even if the dispatch center’s phone lines are disrupted by a telecommunications outage.

Retrieving that data allows dispatchers to use alternative phone lines, agency cellphones or even their own personal phones to redial 911 callers whose calls never reached the dispatch center.

RapidSOS contracts with cellphone manufacturers to collect such data and has long provided it to 911 dispatch centers for free, but the company’s baseline technology required dispatchers to log in to a separate portal than their normal mapping and information systems, said Dave Sankey, the director of Nebraska’s State 911 Department.

The premium version of the software, once installed statewide, will eliminate the need for dispatchers to log in to a separate system and instead provide the information directly through a dispatch center’s normal computer system.

“It’s a much more efficient way to get that information,” Sankey said.

The technology also serves as another safeguard against the 911 service outages that have rattled Southeast Nebraska in particular dating back to August, at least three of which were the result of accidental fiber optic cable cuts.

The Public Service Commission — the state regulatory body that oversees numerous industries in Nebraska, including the telecommunications industry and the 911 department — is investigating five separate disruptions to 911 services in Nebraska since late August that have left frustrations mounting for regulators and lawmakers, who in December questioned Sankey and commissioners over the “systemic” nature of the outages at a public hearing.

Sankey in December could not reassure lawmakers that 911 disruptions wouldn’t happen again, noting that regulators were reliant on telecommunications companies like Lumen and Windstream to keep their services — including 911 systems — up and running.

There have been two 911 service disruptions in Nebraska in the months since December’s hearing as the Public Service Commission has turned to RapidSOS as a “supplement” to the redundancies the state’s telecommunications providers are supposed to offer, Sankey said.

“We don’t expect any future outages, but we do know that there are fiber-optic cables that get cut on a regular basis and we need the carriers to have enough diversity in their networks to deliver the calls,” Sankey said.

“If that occurs, though, and they are unable to deliver the call to the 911 (center), then we have this additional backup option with RapidSOS that the data of the caller … is still getting delivered to the 911 center, at least from a wireless phone.”

More than 80% of 911 calls in the state are made using cellphones, Sankey said.

In Lancaster County, the state’s second-most populous county, 911 dispatchers have had RapidSOS’s baseline technology “for years and have utilized it each and every single day,” said Jessica Loos, the Lincoln- Lancaster County 911 Communications Manager.

The statewide premium RapidSOS subscription, though, will allow the local dispatch center to access the technology on the city’s own mapping system, which plots the location of fire hydrants and natural gas lines, among other important data points not available on the company’s baseline map, Loos said.

The software, too, will provide real-time location and indoor mapping data that RapidSOS has partnered with two other international mapping and location intelligence companies to accumulate, including, for instance, data kept by railroads about the contents of each rail car on a given train that could be useful — or crucial — in the hands of first responders.

“It’s not just rail cars, it’s alarm companies, it’s — as we grow as a community, we’re looking at … information being at our community members’ fingertips in a way that we could have never imagined 20 years ago,” Loos said.

“If you get an Amazon package, you’re probably getting a Ring Doorbell notification, right? (We’re) learning in this profession to leverage the data that exists. And RapidSOS is at the front of that.”

The looming rollout of the software will mark only the latest upgrade to Lincoln’s 911 infrastructure.

The city last year built a new emergency dispatch center inside Lincoln’s newest $7 million police station and contracted with another public safety tech provider for a platform that allows 911 and non-emergency callers to provide livestream video, text, photos and location data to police and fire dispatchers.