aware if one has an issue. Soukup stated, “The cloud is the fu-
ture and as more centers come online with the network approach, it should be virtually impossible to have abandoned 911 calls.” He defi ned abandoned calls as those which were unanswered after 20 seconds. “With such networks, the call would go into the cloud and other centers would answer the calls and for- ward the information to Durham. Cor- porations have been using this system for years, and if all their servers are busy, their calls are routed to someone else’s server in the cloud.” Durham is at the apex of the system
Officer Ryan Ingram outside his car in Durham (N.C.) to respond to a call from their communications center.
N extGen911 Text-
to-911 PSAP (Public Safety Answer- ing Point) technology has become a reality in Durham, N.C., the fi rst PSAP to test text-to-911 technol- ogy with Verizon Wireless and 911 services provider, Intrado. Durham was one of the fi rst few jurisdictions in the country to take the necessary step of moving its emergency call center operations to the cloud. James Soukup, Emergency Services
Center Director, prepared his depart- ment for NextGen911 by moving their 911 emergency call center operations to the cloud, ready for the full range of Web-based Next Generation 911 ser- vices when they were made available. Verizon Wireless chose Durham to pilot a trial 911 texting program in 2011 and Durham began its move to NG911. The carrier delivers the text messages to the PSAP via Intrado. AT&T also tested tex- ting with them in March 2014 and they now have both Verizon and AT&T on board.
Soukup reports their old landline sys-
tem was with Verizon and they were an anomaly as most of North Carolina had
AT&T or other providers. When it be- came necessary to move to a new system with Verizon, the cost was prohibitive and Intrado offered an opportunity to move into the future with NextGen 911 technology. The new cloud-based sys- tem enhanced the capabilities of their communications center, while reducing the existing vulnerabilities. For instance, with their old system,
they had a primary communications center and a backup center and in case of outages, they could physically move from one center to the other. With their new system through Intrado, they can use each center as a separate entity or they can combine the capabilities of both centers and use them simultane- ously and seamlessly. This was a distinct advantage when
the unprecedented winter storm hit Durham in 2013 and they were able to use both centers as one, with calls being routed to whichever operator was avail- able at either center, thus being able to utilize a much larger staff taking calls. Also, with the old 911 system, if a
phone cable was cut, the center would go down, but utilizing the cloud, the calls can be rerouted anywhere, allow- ing a lot less points of failure and the ability to get back online much faster. Intrado has two independent server centers and usually Durham is not even
and he anticipates others joining the network, hopefully with the system going statewide at some point. Much of their existing equipment was replaced with routers. All of their RMS was moved to the cloud as the begin- ning step and that was handled fully by Intrado and Frontier. They would no longer lose their database information in case of any type of catastrophic situa- tion, such as fi re or natural disaster.
NextGen911 Current Advantages and Future Options Soukup stated that everything just came at the right time. He was looking for ways to make their system more techno- logically advanced and the pilot project made that possible. They were the fi rst communications center to be accredited through CALEA and are also accredited through APCO and P33 Training. They are still one of only four centers so ac- credited. They do not receive many 911 calls
by text. The primary advantages of NextGen 911 lie in the networking ca- pabilities and the future opportuni- ties. They will in the future be able to receive photos and videos attached to texts. They will be able to receive pho- tos of suspects, rather than the varying descriptions that often occur. They will be able to receive video feeds from bank security cameras at the 911 center and send those to the offi cers on the street. The Automatic Call Distribution
(ACD) feature looks to see who is avail- able for calls and by the time an auto- mated message is played, “Durham 911, what is your emergency?” the operator
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