Earlier this month, public safety communications professionals descended on Las Vegas for the 2018 APCO International Conference and Expo, the premier event for those in the public safety industry. Over four days, attendees participated in professional development sessions and toured the exhibit hall to talk with vendors and subject-matter experts to gain their insights regarding the future of emergency communications.
While this year’s focus conference focused heavily on cutting-edge issues and technology, there were a few especially hot topics that kept the convention center buzzing.
The Data Speedbump: It is no secret that enhanced data is making its way into the 911 community, and it has the potential to have a major impact on emergency response. The problem is that the industry overwhelmingly remains stuck in a voice-centric mindset. Fortunately, a handful of early adopters already are leveraging data as part of their emergency response efforts and MCP is poised to help others navigate the migration to a data-centric future.
Location, Location, Location: Earlier this year, Apple and RapidSOS announced that the iOS 12 (launching in late 2018) will be able to automatically and securely share location data. This will be accomplished by leveraging the RapidSOS NG911 Clearinghouse and Apple’s Hybridized Emergency Location (HELO) data, which uses cell towers and device-based data to more accurately estimate a mobile 911 caller’s location. This is a huge step toward better location accuracy for more than 85 million iPhone users in the U.S. and one that we believe can help improve response times and create more efficient emergency response.
Security is Key: With smarter, more IP-based technologies coming to public safety, cybersecurity and IT network management have never been more important than they are today. MCP’s Lifecycle Management Services team is prepared to help PSAPs usher in this new era of technology with IT support services—including cybersecurity planning, policies, audit logging, network monitoring and more—that are designed to help prevent, mitigate and quickly recover from attacks.
FirstNet’s Developing Ecosystem: Spied on the vendor floor was a field-deployable Long-Term Evolution (LTE) system contained in a backpack. The key to the system is that it contains an LTE core, which means that users will be able to connect to FirstNet’s network via a satellite uplink and have full functionality. Such a capability would be ideal for wildfire fighters, who often are in the most remote of environments. It’s just one example of the technology ecosystem that is beginning to develop around FirstNet’s network.
Mission-Critical Push-to-Talk: It was clear during APCO that MCPTT is top of mind for many in the public safety community. Today the predecessor of MCPTT, Push to Talk over Cellular (PTToC), is being deployed to provide non-mission-critical personnel—e.g., government, transportation, utilities and public works officials—with PTT functionality using their smartphones, which would be quite useful during a major emergency response event. But what everyone in public safety wants to know is when MCPTT will develop to the point that traditional land mobile radio systems can be retired. Talkaround is one of the highly discussed issues, but there are other important considerations, such as the low-power output of smartphones, which significantly curtails range. Also, how MCPTT will interoperate across different providers (e.g., Kodiak, ESChat) and across different carrier networks (e.g., FirstNet, AT&T, Verizon), and how it will interface to Wi-Fi, needs to be considered.
While some believe that such issues never will be resolved, the truth is that the device manufacturers are racing to find answers, and someone eventually will figure all of this out. At APCO, for instance, one vendor announced a plug-in accessory that turns a smartphone into a P25 radio—with equivalent power levels used in today’s LMR devices to achieve talkaround communications. The technologists will need several more years to make MCPTT public safety-ready, and then a decade or two—at least—before public safety officials trust MCPTT enough to retire their LMR systems. In the meantime, MCP has ample opportunity to provide the guidance they need to make informed decisions.
Staffing, Staffing, Staffing: After speaking with numerous PSAP officials during APCO, it quickly became clear that staffing is the proverbial “thing under the bed,” the one aspect of their operations that causes them to lose sleep. Always a challenge, personnel churn today is being exacerbated by a very healthy economy. Many telecommunicators are leaving for better-paying, less-stressful jobs. In addition, the candidate pool has shrunk, because less people are seeking jobs.
A contributing factor is that PSAP officials often promote telecommunicators into supervisory roles who are inexperienced or unqualified, often due to union contracts or a desire to reward someone who has performed in an exemplary manner. While PSAPs are diligent in training telecommunicators given the life-and-death nature of their jobs, they often have no mechanism in place for training supervisors. Ill-equipped supervisors can spawn discontent in the ranks—making an already stressful job more stressful, which often leads to flight—people typically find it difficult to abide a bad boss. This is another aspect that provides MCP with ample opportunity to provide valuable guidance driven by its depth of expertise and experience.
An Eye Toward the Future: This year’s APCO conference was certainly future-focused, with professional development sessions and an exhibit hall full of vendors discussing the new technologies and systems available to help evolve public safety. However, without the proper facilities to house these new technologies and systems or staff trained to take advantage of the data influx, public safety will continue to find itself unable to completely move away from the past. It is important that agencies have a trusted partner to help them make the leap—whether it is upgrading an existing facility, building a new facility from the ground up, updating or replacing CAD, RMS and other automated systems, or conducting workforce and staffing assessments.
Topics: Industry News, Technology
