Securing NextGen 911 with Fiber

Immediately calling for help by dialing 911 is one of many public safety benefits we often take for granted in today’s modern society. But almost half of the Emergency Communication Centers (ECCs) in the United States are still using legacy analog TDM telephony infrastructure and need to be upgraded to fiber broadband to deliver Next Generation 911 (NG911) services that will provide significant and meaningful benefits for callers, first responders, and the communities in which they are located.

Left: Next Generation 911 (NG911) services built on fiber provide first responders with more reliable and robust call center dispatch and the ability to flow multimedia from callers directly to
responding vehicles. Source: Canva. Right: The nation’s 911 call centers are migrating from voice to IP and multimedia, with fiber at the heart of the transition. Source: Canva.

“There are over 5,000 public safety access points (PSAPs) in the United States,” said Brandon Abley, Chief Technology Officer for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). “What we call legacy 911 or enhanced 911 is based on TDM systems using the old telephony infrastructure. There’s still a lot of that out there. What Next Generation 911 does is move the entire system to IP. It’s much more resilient and secure. It’s an advanced, modern IP-based telecommunications system.”

NG911 provides “a ton of benefits,” stated Abley, providing better interoperability across the entire 911 ecosystem, competition among vendors, enhanced call routing and caller location, and the ability to support multimedia traffic and the communications applications that younger generations have grown up with.

“We have what we call interim text to 911 right now in much of the United States,” said Abley. “It’s fairly basic. It doesn’t give that rich experience you get with modern texting, such as pictures. Multimedia calling in NG911 gives you all sorts of benefits. My favorite is direct video calling to the 911 system, so if you are deaf or hard of hearing, you can directly place a multimedia 911 call into the NG911 system and conduct a conversation in American Sign Language.”

One of the institutional problems with migrating from legacy 911 systems to NG911 is getting a commitment for resources.

“There’s a big funding problem across the 911 industry in general, and that’s only exacerbated by the need to upgrade technology to next generation 911 but then maintain the two side by side as these copper services get increasingly old and increasingly expensive,” said Abley. “It’s very different, 911 service can’t go down, so it’s difficult to pay for both systems during the migration, but you must during that period. So, there will be some years where a lot of 911 still depends on TDM service.”

Properly implementing NG911 networks should take advantage of the best practices and lessons learned in the telecommunications industry, including incorporating at least two geographically diverse paths of fiber for redundancy and resilience. Once implemented, NG911 services bring levels of flexibility and the ability to rapidly reconfigure and supplement services that are essentially impossible with legacy TDM services.

“In legacy 911 we do alternative routes for traffic based on circumstances, and it’s a bit more crude,” Abley said. “In NG911 we have a really robust function called the policy or item function, which can look at all sorts of circumstances, including the security posture at the endpoint, the queue states. You can set up special events ahead of time. There’s a lot built in to make sure that your 911 call gets answered, no matter what kind of circumstances. That’s one of the fundamental parts of the design.”

NG911 demonstrated its rerouting value in North Carolina during Hurricane Helene. The state had linked its PSAPs together in a state-based network, enabling the redistribution of 911 calls to operational centers even when 19 affected call centers went out of service during the storm.

But for NG911, geographic proximity is not required for handling and rerouting calls. Fairfax County, Virginia, and Metro Nashville Davidson County, Tennessee, launched the first interstate 911 backup system in the United States in February of this year. Leveraging the power of IP and fiber, the two municipalities can ensure uninterrupted emergency call services in the event of local or regional communication outages, providing enhanced resilience against cyberattacks, infrastructure damage and other threats that could affect both operations. Remarkably, there are no additional costs associated with the agreement, as the technology required to implement the arrangement is already in place.

These dedicated Emergency Services IP Networks (ESInets) built using NG911 systems are connecting PSAPs and first responders into a common open-standards framework that provides higher security, reliability, and scalability than legacy systems, enabling third parties to provide additional cloud-based services tailored for the first responder community.

NENA isn’t the only public safety association that believes fiber is a critical component of the public safety equation. Founded in 1935, APCO is the world’s oldest and largest organization of public safety communications professionals, with over 40,000 members that manage, operate, build and support public safety communications systems for first responders and other public safety agencies.

“Public safety is in an evolution, and fiber is a critical piece of that,” said Stephen Devine, Chief Technology Officer, APCO International. “We want to make sure that ECCs have the same capabilities as the public does, regarding accessing data and multimedia. We don’t think the ECC should have any less functionalities than individuals do, and we think that’s critical. There are technologies today that allow the caller to dial in and call 911 and for the ECC to offer them a text link that can open a video session between the caller and the operator.”

Migrating ECCs onto IP and bringing multimedia into them enables new tools to assist with the call center process while changing the role of the operator. “AI integration is helping,” said Devine. “We’re seeing AI manage some of the workload and the call distribution within the ECC. The role of the telecommunicator in that ECC is changing from something that was simply taking calls and is now managing data. That job is changing because the mechanism in which we communicate with the caller and our field personnel are both being altered, so that role of public safety telecommunicator, is changing with it, because the needs are having to be met differently, and the caller has the greater needs, the people in the field have greater needs, and all of that is predicated on the ECC making those adjustments.”

The flexibility NG911 brings into handling and transferring information of all types is providing substantial value for neighboring municipalities who have adopted the technology. For counties and states that share borders, the geographically closest first responder with the shortest route to an incident may be one in a different jurisdiction. Multimedia data flows coming from the ECC from a cell phone can also be directed to police and fire command centers and pushed down to the vehicle level to increase situational awareness and provide better information to first responders in route and on-scene. “We see the ECC as something that used to be voice centric,” said Devine. “Now the ECC is the hub responsible for distributing information, imaging, and video to first responders in the field.”

Both NENA and APCO see the migration to NG911 and its standards-based approach as vital to fostering critical interoperability across organizations and the public in the long-term.

“The United States doesn’t have a 911 system, it has several hundred of them, generally operated at the state level, with some municipalities and metro areas,” said Abley. “It’s a system of systems that stitch together across the United States. Fiber deployment for those next generation 911 core services is just as important as fiber to the end point.”