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Maricopa 911 goes to the cloud for improved service
Just outside Phoenix, Maricopa Region 911 (MR911) was experiencing a dramatic increase in emergency calls from mobile phones, text-to-911, even videophone callers – all new wireless formats that can stress a traditional 911 network.
Across the U.S., new mobile and Internet phone technologies are placing increasing demands on 911 call centers. Pinpointing a mobile caller’s exact location, maintaining mobile call quality and providing network capacity from mobile and Internet-based phones has created new challenges for emergency call centers.
MR911 had been using frame relay for its primary network, which generally was a reliable configuration. However, with the dramatic increase in mobile and Internet-based calls, managing the network was proving to be more and more challenging.
MR911 turned to a cloud-based solution from Talari to help handle more than 2.2 million calls for police, fire and emergency medical assistance each year. The solution, called an SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking), uses software and the Internet to connect branch offices and data centers over vast geographic distances.
The Talari SD-WAN brings real-time, packet-level intelligence to MR911’s 25 Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) and its two data centers. The system, which was installed in 2010, helps ensure that underlying network issues don’t adversely affect emergency calls.
Dave Dansevicus, 911 Integrated Systems Administrator for Maricopa County, says SD-WAN gives “peace of mind and visibility that is invaluable in terms of knowing we are going to deliver those calls without interruption.”
“With Talari, we’re able to prioritize traffic so that we can have active 911 calls, 911 mapping data and server backup over the network, all at the same time,” he says.
Go here for more information on Talari.
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