When Americans call 911, they expect to receive help quickly. Businesses have an obligation to make sure their employees, customers and visitors have swift access to assistance in the event of an emergency. Here are three reasons businesses may want to rely on a 911 solution provider for support with fulfilling their safety responsibilities. Read More >
Mary Boyd
VP of Government & Regulatory Affairs
Emergency communications have improved exponentially since the first 911 call nearly 50 years ago. However, some features of our present day enterprise communications technology has placed users of this service at a disadvantage when it comes to 911. The flexible nature of multi-line telephone systems (MLTS) can cross many public safety jurisdictional boundaries. This creates problems during emergency situations calls when valuable accurate caller location information and call back capabilities are not made available to public safety entities.
Your security team can play a vital role during an emergency situation; however, they need to be aware that there is an emergency in the enterprise, the nature of the situation, and its precise location. With West’s Desk Alert solution, you’ll empower your security team with tools that help them to be of assistance in ways that were previously impossible.
The E911 legislation is modeled on Kari’s Law, so-named in honor of Kari Hunt whose tragic passing in 2013 alerted the nation to the dangers of requiring a dialing prefix to access 911. Simply, this new NYC law will allow users of these MLTS to dial 911 without requiring any prefix, post-fix or trunk access code. In addition to the direct dialing provision, the E911 legislation also requires that on-site notifications be issued when 911 is dialed and that calls must be directly delivered to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).
If you’ve been tasked with choosing an E911 solution for your enterprise, it can be tempting to set up an on-site notification alert and have emergency responders receive the location details they need once they arrive on-site.
While this strategy seems to be able to keep your organization safe, make no mistake: implementing notification alerts on their own as an E911 solution can place your organization and your employees in grave danger. For E911, relaying an accurate, dispatchable address to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) is essential; this ensures that first responders arrive with the information they need to quickly locate and help the caller.
When 911 is dialed, most organizations know that they need to deliver both the call and the caller’s location information to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). In an IP-based communications network, this is achieved with E9-1-1 management appliances and call routing solutions.
As an added feature with many of these solutions, you can also notify internal security of a 911 call in progress, using screen pops, emails, and pre-recorded messages. Although these notifications provide enough basic information (extension #, location, and name) to alert security of a 911 call, they do not provide enough situational awareness for security to act on. Read More >
A well-researched and comprehensive E9-1-1 Request For Proposal (RFP) is an invaluable tool when selecting an E9-1-1 solution for your organization. It allows you to easily evaluate competing solutions and clearly decide, which one is most appropriate for your unique deployment. Getting the information you need to make an informed decision does not have to be a challenging or complicated matter, if you make sure to include a few key elements in your E9-1-1 RFP.
Elements of a Great E9-1-1 Request For Proposal
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