Pandemic Ramped Up the Need for Real Next-Gen 911 Solutions

While society has gotten more mobile and smartphones have become the norm, the 911 industry has been playing catch-up. And while there are states and jurisdictions with next-generation 911 (NG911) systems in place, the hill to climb to do so has gotten steeper in the last couple of years since the pandemic as workers have become even more mobile.

“With NG911 it would be so much better,” said Mark Fletcher, vice president of public safety at emergency communications firm 911inform. “Communications has radically changed over the last couple of years. When you think about the pandemic and people working from home, it’s changed the way we live. It’s been on a vertical climb, and every day that goes by it’s becoming more and more important where the legacy stuff won’t cut it anymore.”

Progress in moving to NG911 has been slow, although location accuracy has improved, according to Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association. “There have been huge improvements in location accuracy both in the horizontal and vertical planes, and in the next-generation environment, that data will push from the call center right to first responders,” he told Emergency Management.

But that’s not enough Fletcher said, calling the deployment of complete NG911 systems around the country “minimal.”

He said there are three connected segments or pillars of NG911 that are important for a complete public safety deployment: the originators of information, the network and the communication centers.

“You have to have somebody generating the data, in a next-generation format that’s useful, then the communication centers have to be able to receive it, correlate it, read it and use it,” Fletcher said.

“The industry has historically looked at the 911 centers and said, ‘OK, we’ve got that [piece of NG911] done, we’ve got NG911,’” he added. “But it’s like watching I Love Lucy on a 90-inch TV over cable. It’s still a black-and-white source.”

In other words, one of the major pillars is missing.

Fletcher said it’s not a well-understood problem and some jurisdictions are “afraid” of the new technology. “People think they’re buying a 911 solution, [but] they may be buying a legacy 911 solution not realizing that [while] it will still work in the future, it’s certainly not going to be NG911 with multimedia capabilities.”