Next Gen. 9-1-1 to build on existing system

Jeff Green | Jan 15, 2020

In North and Central Frontenac, the 9-1-1 system was made possible through a volunteer effort. Volunteer crew chiefs were given sections of road to cover and volunteers drove the township with measuring guns to establish the civic addressing system upon which the system was based.

The system was officially up and running on December 8, 2004.

In South Frontenac the efforts were supervised by a contract worker, but volunteers were involved as well.

Even though the systems were established only 15 years ago, one of the assumptions that it was based one is no longer the case, that 9-1-1 emergency calls come from land-lines.

Kevin Farrell, manager of continuous improvement/GIS for Frontenac County, made a presentation to Frontenac County Council this week outlining how the Next Generation of the 9-1-1 system will be unfolding over the next few years. He pointed out that, using an urban example to illustrate his point, “Uber drivers are in possession of more accurate data about where people are located than paramedics are.”

That’s because the explosion of information being transmitted wirelessly at all times, is not being fully utilised by the 9-1-1 system. Next Gen. 9-1-1, as it has been dubbed, is all about making use of all the information that is available, in order to get to people in need faster, with less human effort.

For Frontenac County, most of the required changes fall into the general category of data management. Between the county, which runs the GIS (Global Information Systems) for the townships, and township employees on the ground, constantly updating information, the job will centre on ensuring that the existing data is in the form it needs to be in, when it is time to provide new data sets to the new system.

The civic addressing signs, which are located at the side of the road, are the locations that are provided to emergency personnel by the system. One of the changes in the new system will be to provide the location of the homes on those properties as well, which in some cases are located well off the roadway.

The phone numbers from land lines associated with each property are part of the current system, so when a call is made from a land line, dispatchers have that information and can dispatch crews, even if the caller does not remember their civic address in the heat of the moment.

This is not the case for cell phones, however, and as Farrell pointed out in his presentation, 70% of 9-1-1 calls now come from cell phones, 20% from land-lines and 10% from Internet based phone systems (aka Voice Over Internet Protocol - VOIP).

The current system has developed what his presentation described as “band-aide solutions to locate mobile phone users”. One of the main goals in developing Next-Gen 9-1-1, is to make full use of the information that is now available from multiple sources, including: text, images, video and data.

Preparing for it will not involve re-doing the work that was done by volunteers early in the century, however.

“This civic addressing data, which has been continually updated by township staff since the system came online, will remain” said Farrell in a phone interview before making his presentation to Council, “but it will be a challenge to provide updated information to the system, in the time-frame that they are now looking for.”

Township building and public works employees are always gathering new information when putting up new signs or overseeing new construction, and that information is provided to the system in batches. In the future that will have to be done within 72 hours, so a new way to easily get new entries into the system, needs to be developed.

The new 9-1-1 data system will have a national scope and will be under development for some time.

“This presentation provides a heads-up to Council about what is coming, and to let them know what our department and the townships are going to be working on,” Farrell said.