How will texts and video calls be handled by the PSAP in the near future?
Demonstrations of these capabilities were given at the Illinois Public Safety Telecommunications Association (IPSTA) 2012 conference earlier this week (October 21 – 24, 2012) in Springfield, Illinois. The presentation by the team of Barbara Kemp and David Staub of Assure911 and Brian Knueppel of Acme Packet showed how text messages and video calls can be routed by location of the caller to a call taker at the appropriate PSAP. The connections leveraged the ESInet and NG 9-1-1 system set up in the Real Time Communications Lab at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), to deliver text messages from a handheld device in the auditorium to a laptop registered as a call taker on the i3 PSAP located at the Lab.
The video call showed the ability to provide important visual data, in this case the building floor plan, from the scene of a simulated emergency event to the call taker position.
Barbara Kemp outlined the way a call flows through an NG 9-1-1 system. A write-up on the subject in everyday terminology can be downloaded by clicking below:
Another demonstration showed how video from a caller can be distributed to a wider audience using existing video broadcasting technology. What made this and the other connections special, besides routing based on location, was that they were all completely secure. Since the flow of data went through the IIT RTCL ESInet, in each case it was protected by the Acme Packet Border Control Function (BCF), one of the NG 9-1-1 Functional Elements deployed at the lab.
The presentation can be downloaded from the Assure911 website here:
Assure911 and AcmePacket at IPSTA 2012
The talk also covered the topics of ESInet Security, NG 9-1-1 Reliability and end-to-end Network Management. The Assure911 team showed the use a Mobile App for network management.