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Good day ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National 911 Program, State of 911 Webinar. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Later we will conduct a
question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. If anyone
should require audio assistance during the conference, please press star than zero to reach an
operator. Today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Given.
Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of State of 911 Webinar series being presented
by the National 911 Program. My name is Brian Given and I am support for the Program.
This webinar series was designed to offer
911 stakeholders information about ongoing federal, state 911 and NG911 projects and provide real experiences
and best practices from early adopters into NG911 transition currently underway across the country.
Like I mentioned before, this is the fourth installment
our bi-monthly series. Each webinar consists of a presentation from a federal-level and state-level 911
stakeholder with each being followed by a 10 minute Q&A session.
At the end of the event if there's time left over we will open up the floor
to answer all questions. Following the event a recording of the presentation along with the slides
will be posted to the National 911 Program website www.911.gov. You can also go there to find information
about past and future events as well as learn more about the National 911 Program.
Finally, this event is being live captioned. The link to the live
captioning can be found in the reminder e-mail that went out to all registered participants about
an hour ago. We'll begin today's event with a presentation from New York City Police Department
Assistant Chief Charles Dowd. He is a member of the FirstNet board and will be providing a FirstNet update.
Following the Q&A which Chief Dowd, Mr. Patrick Lustig, director of Jackson County, Illinois 911 and
Kenneth Smith, 911 coordinator for Williamson County 911, will be presenting on the Counties of
Southern Illinois Next Generation 911 project. Now I'd like to hand off to Ms. Laurie Flaherty,
Coordinator for the National 911 Program for an introduction of Chief Dowd. LAURIE FLAHERTY: Thanks and welcome
everyone on behalf of the 911 Program. It's my pleasure to introduce Assistant Chief Chuck Dowd who is
with the New York City Police Department. Chief Dowd is a 30 year veteran of the New York City Police
Department and just received a promotion to Assistant Chief on April 26 so congratulations to you sir.
Chief Dowd is currently the Commanding Officer of the New York City Police Department's communication
division which has more than 1,500 members and is arguably the largest and busiest 911 system in the
country with a police radio operation that dispatch about 4.5 million radio runs every year.
Chief Dowd is a member and works closely with numerous national organizations. He's testified before
the FCC as well as Congress on a number of occasions and has been appointed as a member of the FirstNet Board
of Directors and it is in that capacity that he is with us today. So Chief Dowd, the floor is yours.
CHIEF DOWD: First of all I want to thank you. I want to thank Brian, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to
your group today. We got a busy 911 center here. And the folks I'm sure that are on the phone understand
the importance of 911 to emergency response. You can't get the job done without 911. And as we move from
Enhanced 911, E911 moving forward now towards next generation 911 it is going to be an interesting confluence
of technologies as we try to push that information out in a meaningful way to respond to first responders. If
we could go to the next slide. Public safety. Obviously for the last several years, we have clearly identified
the need for improved technology. Just as one example, the NYPD has been reduced in uniform size from a high of
about 42,000 uniformed members in 2001. We are down to about 34,500 uniformed members in the NYPD today. One
of the ways that you make up for that differences is by using technology as a force multiplier. As we in
the NYPD started to look at -- and by the way shouldn't just say the NYPD. As public safety in general started
to look at emerging technologies, we realized the value of it for initially for investigations. And how we push
information out to detectives. In the instance of the NYPD, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly established in 2005
what is called a real-time crime center. Which has revolutionized the way detectives conduct their
investigations in the field by pushing information out very rapidly to them, to aid them in conducting their
investigation. And again, it has been a tremendous force multiplier in that regard.
Looking further down the road, as a whole in public safety, we realized that we just didn't want to get this
information out just to detectives. We want to have the ability to rapidly deploy information in a meaningful
way to first responders. The uniformed officers, deputies, firefighters, EMS personnel, how do we get that
information that they need or they want to send back to hospitals or to command staff in a meaningful way. And
it became readily apparent to us that this public safety nationwide public safety broadband network was the
ultimate solution for reliable information sharing mission-critical information sharing inside public safety.
Next slide please. Most of these incidents everybody that is on the phone is familiar with. 9/11, we
learned tremendous lessons from there. Sandy, most recently the incident in Boston all highlight the
criticality of having mission-critical data capability for public safety. Just taking for example the Boston
incident, having talked to some of the experts out there, recently had conversations with Terry Hall, the
President of APCO who was in the Boston area on other business at the time of that incident. It has become
increasingly clear each time one of these incidents occur, that just the ability to talk on land mobile radio
is not going to be enough to get the job done. We need a mission-critical data network to support our land
mobile radio capability and to be able to share information. For example, you had a mass casualty situation in
Boston. How do you triage those folks quickly to understand and to get assistance from doctors and hospitals on
who needs to be transported first and who can wait for an ambulance later. In incidents like that it is crystal
clear that you need a capability to reliably send data to hospitals, telemeds, in order for the hospitals to
understand number one, the patients that they are getting so they can get ready for them, and again also to
prioritize who goes first. It has been well documented that the commercial networks became very quickly
inundated in the area of the marathon and actually for quite an area around that. My conversations with Terry
Hall from APCO, he pointed out to me that he was 9 miles away from the incident and they were having difficulty
making cellular calls or sending text messages through the commercial networks. Simply because the networks
were inundated. There were initial reports that talked about difficulties with the networks, the police had
shut the networks down. It was in accurate information. It was simply the volume on the networks. Next slide
please. Public safety. This effort we went through five or six year effort to get this historic legislation
passed through this -- what was also historic coalition of public safety under the public safety alliance,
every police, fire and EMS first response organization and agency in the country supported the effort. And we
were successful getting the legislation passed, which created FirstNet. And again why FirstNet?
We want to make sure on a nationwide architecture basis, that we get an overarching nationwide architecture
that will ensure interoperability or what I refer to as simple
nationwide operability. Interoperability refers to linking
disparate networks together. That is not what we're about here. We're about building a network that meets
the requirements of public safety but is operable throughout the country so that no matter where first
responders ultimately go, their communications capability remains the same. That is the goal here. It needs to
be mission-critical. It needs to be cost effective. It will be a tremendous force multiplier, and for this
group, I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance of the integration of this network with 911
currently E911 and next generation 911 which is just around the corner for every 911 center in this country.
Interestingly, one of the reasons -- next slide please. One of the reasons that we selected -- one of the many
reasons that public safety selected LTE as the technology of choice for its mission-critical public safety
network was first of all that it is an IP-based network. It should integrate very well with next generation 911
solutions. Why is that important? Let me give you a couple of quick examples. Recently, there was -- very
heavily covered here in the New York City area. I don't know if it
got national coverage. There was an incident where one of our off-duty 911
call takers was on her way to work on a city bus on Staten Island. As she was sitting there and other persons
on the bus noticed this, there was an individual sitting on the other side who was moving stuff around in his
knapsack. As he did that, they noticed the handle of a handgun in the bag as he was shifting his items around.
He noticed that they noticed. He made a comment to the effect that don't worry about it, just for my personal
protection. You don't have to worry about it. Here's a situation where next generation 911 will be critical,
and I want to talk hypothetically after I tell you what actually happened about how this will work in my view
with next generation 911. In this instance, the operator knew she couldn't make a phone call because the
perpetrator was sitting on the other side of the bus. Knew that several people had seen the gun and he was
alert to the fact that they might be calling 911 on him. He didn't get off the bus. He continued to ride.
Casually, after a couple of minutes, that off-duty 911 call taker started texting to another 911 call taker who
was off-duty who she is very close with and told her to call 911. That other operator called 911 identified
herself and started passing information from the call taker that was on the bus through 911. They were able to
identify where the bus was, its direction of travel, where it was headed and ultimately police were able to
respond. They came onto the bus and were able to apprehend the perpetrator and place him under arrest. That
is the way we do it under today's technology. In the future, what I would envision in that scenario is that it
would happen a little differently. Sure, she would try to casually surreptitiously send text messages but she
should be able to do that sending them to 911 and explaining directly to 911 call taker or information receiver
at that point what is going on, why she is texting the information rather than calling, and then not only
should the 911 call taker that is receiving the information be able to act on it, but there is also -- if we
integrate correctly with the public safety broadband network, with the FirstNet network, there should be an
ability there to pass that information directly to responding units in real-time so that they can actually see
those texts and act on it as well rather than getting it once or twice or even three times removed as is what
happened in the incident that I described earlier to you. Another way that this will integrate into 911 and
a classic example is a domestic violence incident. Ultimately, you
would integrate your CAD system with your critical
databases and again in the example of the NYPD, that would be our real-time crime center. You would be able to
send certain pieces of information or they would be able to -- officers would be able to access certain pieces
of information that they simply cannot access today. Under the domestic violence incident we know from
experience that many victims, once the police arrive, are very reluctant to cooperate with the police and will
even say that they didn't call in many cases.
The ability to send the 911 audio or download 911 audio which would be related to the CAD incident from the
911 call and send it in real-time to the officers that were responding to the unit and the ability for them to
replay it, to listen to it or replay it for the victim, let's say in the police car would be a huge advantage
to understanding the incident they are involved in. Other information they could get in that situation, because
they would be linked to the databases are the dispatch system, they could get information like, how many
domestic incident reports have happened at that location?
How many times have the police been there before? Have there been weapons involved?
Prior arrest? Is there a court order of protection that stipulates that the offender should
not even be present at the location? All of that information could be available through this network. I think
we're very excited about the opportunity here of linking or integrating 911 with the broadband network. Next
slide please. Now, going back a little but more to talk about the evolution of FirstNet. Again, public safety
broadband network concept, 2006, 2007. 2008 auction failed. I think from many people's perspectives one of the
reasons that the auction failed it wasn't clear to everybody that this
was going to be a mission-critical network.
And we knew based on the information we were developing that we wanted to be able to share with responding
units as we develop these integrated analytical databases that we needed a network that was going to be as
important and reliable as our land mobile radio networks that we rely on so heavily today. 2009, the public
safety community organized -- I mentioned that earlier, a historic effort to get police, fire and EMS on the
same page, OEMs, state CIOs, National Governments Association, US conference of mayors, a whole host of
agencies and organizations that got behind this effort and helped push it in Congress and ultimately resulted
in the passage within the Middle Class Tax Relief Act last year of the FirstNet spectrum assignment. The
assignment of initially $2 billion in funding. With the potential for $5 billion more and most importantly,
20 megahertz of spectrum available nationwide. Which is critical to this effort. Next slide please.
FirstNet purpose again to provide first responders with a system that they know they can trust. Something that
they know or can trust ultimately as well as or better than they trust their land mobile radio systems today.
These networks have to be critical. When we look at commercial networks, and this is not a criticism. They have
a different mission for commercial networks. They are there to serve the public even during times of crisis
like what happened in Boston or on 9/11. What we need is a network
dedicated to public safety, that will allow public safety to do its job and
they can trust during critical events like that they will have availability.
One of the frustrations on the part of the Boston Police Department
and Boston fire Department and EMS was the simple fact that trying to send
something as simple as a text message or make a cell phone call was a problem. They had to rely heavily on
their land mobile radio systems. I see there is a quote here, stolen from me by my good friend Jeff Johnson
from the fire department. Kiddingly, it is going to be a tremendous force multiplier. The fact that I mentioned
earlier about the ability to send medical information from the scene of
a mass casualty incident is going to be a tremendous
advantage for emergency medical personnel. The ability for fire -- responding fire units to see building
schematics in response to multi-story building fire and also to understand what types of items that are
potentially dangerous, what is being stored in a warehouse, are there propane tanks, something else that could
endanger them if they fire were to reach it? The ability to get that information in real-time is going to help
save lives. Next slide please. FirstNet established the congressional legislation established FirstNet. It
gave us -- I mentioned earlier 20 megahertz of spectrum. $2 billion in funding with the potential for 5 billion
more -- $5 billion based on future options. And what we have is what I think is a very nice blend on the board
of Public safety, state and local representation, and commercial folks that have experience in building in
these technologies. Again, talks about interoperability. I would like to refer to it nowadays as just seamless
operability. But certainly, interoperability also applies. Next slide. There is been a lot of due
diligence on this. NPSTC, NIST, the FCC, NTIA, SAFECOM, all play important parts of this puzzle of
supplying this information. And NIST does a lot of work for us. In looking
at what the vendor community is doing. They're doing independent
testing for us. And sharing the data with us. We have a whole
slew of requirements developed. And that is just at
the beginning. That is going to continue. This is going to be -- a dynamic process. This technology will evolve
as it goes forward. We need to constantly reevaluate the technology and the requirements and adjust them as we
go. Next slide please. Again, a dedicated public safety network.
The ability for this network to work reliably on
mission-critical basis during the most critical incidents to be able to supply information to our emergency
responders. The applications capabilities that FirstNet is looking at. We want to ensure that applications for
public safety are appropriate. We want to have the flexibility to allow state and local first responder unit
and agencies to have their own applications. Some of them are homegrown. Similar to some of the ones we have
here in the NYPD other police and fire and other EMS organizations have developed over time. We want to make
sure that those play nice within the FirstNet network. And we want to share those technologies through FirstNet
wherever we can. The public safety community is not a competitive community. It's a noncompetitive community.
And we always very frequently share information and our thoughts and our experiences across this. I feel that
FirstNet is helpful in facilitating the sharing of that information on a nationwide basis. So that if Phoenix,
Arizona is doing something really slick and new, it would be great to be able to leverage that here in New York
City or in Chicago. Or in rural North Dakota. That is the purpose of this network. It's just not to be able to
share information in real time but to be able to share information globally within the public safety community
to make sure that if we are doing something well here, that everybody else knows about it. If Boston needs
help during their incident, something we have that could help from Phoenix or from New York or from Chicago,
how do we get that information to them reliably? One of the things we talked about many times as you look at
the incident in Boston. You look at the bomb incident in Times Square eight years ago. One of your fears always
is and we experienced in Boston, there were secondary devices. Bomb squads have to respond. They perform
obviously a critical role at that juncture. They may have to render a device safe and in rendering that device
safe, one of the things they cannot do to date that this network would readily facilitate is if they're running
a high definition video of their actions and trying to render a device safe, they can be sharing the
information with bomb squads across the country in real-time and if that device is familiar to a bomb squad
member in Denver, Colorado, that bomb squad member in Denver could actually supply information in real-time to
Boston in a hypothetical scenario in order to help them render that device safe. Next slide please.
One of the things that we are very interested in going forward here is we have our early builders. A number of
jurisdictions have received BTOP awards and they will be working towards, we will be working very closely with
them to understand their experiences. We have some urban members there, rural members, states that are doing
this. It is going to be I think hugely advantageous to understand their experiences so that we can build the
positives from those experiences into the larger buildout nationwide and also to avoid any problems that they
might encounter. What worked and what didn't work. Let's go with what works and let's not try to reinvent the
wheel from place to place, let's leverage what we know works and move away from what we find out didn't work
well. Next slide please. Again, the things I just mentioned. On the slide. Talking about understanding what it
is they learn -- we will learn from the early builders. The BTOP locations. We are currently in the process of
negotiating through NTIA because the BTOP program is a NTIA program. Leases onto our spectrum so they
can move forward with their projects and again, it's all about -- collaboration and engagement which I think is
a better word. We want to engage with these groups and others to understand what it is they learned, what it is
they think they need and make sure they get it so that local, state and local public safety organizations
understand the FirstNet goal here is a nationwide architecture but we want to give as much local influence and
control over network deployment, network build, and network requirements as they feel they are comfortable
with. This is not about FirstNet going in and saying this is what you are going to get. This is about FirstNet
going in and understanding and engaging with locals and understanding what it is they need through the states,
understanding it and ensuring that they get what they need through this process. Next slide please. Here are
some dates that are available. Which I'm sure we are prepared to share with all the folks that are listening in
today. We have one of our first efforts is going to be regional meetings, six regional meetings with the state
so that they can have members participate and understand where FirstNet is so that we can understand their
requirements and engage with them and move forward. We will also be doing next slide please -- we will also be
doing individual stay consultations or engagements. I prefer the word engagement. We will be doing that as we
move forward. That will be done through May and June as well. I believe the schedule is very aggressive. We
don't have the individual state dates yet but we are working on them, it will be a very aggressive timetable.
Again, having been involved in this collaborative effort, for really six years now, I want to assure everybody
that is listening that FirstNet goal here is to ensure that public safety gets a network, that they can rely on
and that they can trust and will get the job done under the worst of circumstances. The experience of Sandy I
think taught everybody in this process a great deal. And that is that commercial networks are built quite
frankly to a different standard than public safety networks. And we need to build a public safety requirements
for this broadband network. Again, during Sandy, the public safety networks here in New York City and the
surrounding jurisdictions functioned well. They performed and they stayed up. I don't know if any network,
public safety network that went down at all during the course of that -- in the New York metropolitan area.
Kudos to the folks that build those networks and support those networks. It was a great effort.
It was also a good learning opportunity for FirstNet because we had a number board members come into New York
City during Sandy and for three days, we had meetings with them, to come around, show them the site
inspections, visited precincts, firehouses and showed them the impact of that storm and what the difficulties
were and what we thought was a way to solve that solution potentially from a local perspective. I can tell you
they were very engaged and again, I am confident that the board has a good blend of state, local, public
safety, federal partners and commercial partners and I'm confident that we are going to be able to get the job
done as we move forward. I think we have one more slide. And just to reiterate what I was just talking about. A
couple of key points. FirstNet is about public safety. That spectrum belongs to public safety. FirstNet is a
caretaker for it and has the obligation to make sure this network gets constructed. But that spectrum belongs
to FirstNet. One of the other things you want to do is -- we don't have this list yet, but hopefully in the
near future we will be able to get it to you, you want to identify your
state point of contacts. As a guy that comes from a large
city, I've been stressing with the Major City Chief's Association, Metro Fire Chiefs,
the Major County Sheriff's Association that they want to get involved in
the state process. The legislation dictates at least initially that state engagement or
public safety engagement happens through the states. But I would urge everybody state, city and local to make
sure that you get your voices heard in that process. You get engaged in that process. Because it's going to
be critical. If you have specialized needs where you are, you have to make sure you get involved with your
state process and be engaged and get that information into the states so they understand what your requirements
are so FirstNet can understand what your requirements are. Again, I want to thank you folks. I know I ran over
a little bit but I want to thank you for your time and happy to answer questions if there are any out there.
OPERATOR: Ladies and Gentleman, if you would like to ask a question over the phone,
please press the star key and then the one key on your touchtone
telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue press the pound
key. Again, if you would like to ask a question over the phone, press star one.
And we do have a question from Rob Erlich.
ROBERT ERLICH: Hi Chief Dowd, I've been following FirstNet very closely
am very impressed with the work so far. One of the things I've noticed is that with 70% to 80% of fire and EMS
personnel being volunteer, how are you taking into account within the FirstNet community the interviews with
states which are typically paid personnel, the needs of the volunteers out there in the United States?
CHIEF DOWD: That's a great question. I know that Jeff Johnson,
Fire Chief on the board and Kevin McGinnis are very
concerned about that. And the rest of us because we know that police and sheriffs have to work very closely
with them. This is -- the issue of funding and keeping costs down from my personal perspective is a critical
part of this solution. We need to make sure that this network is built in a manner and that the funding and the
business mechanisms for the build out of this network have to take into account those types of situations.
Those agencies, they're running cake sales in order to buy equipment. We have to ensure that they get access to
this network just like a fire agency like the FDNY would get access to it. And I think one of the critical
parts of this, a key to this puzzle is going to be how we ensure that spectrum again -- the legislation allows
us to secondary use of the spectrum. We can allow for secondary users including commercial use of the network
on a lower priority and as long as public safety gets instantaneous access and preemptive priority in the
network, in other words any secondary use is invisible to first responders, then I think we need to ensure that
we maximize the value of that secondary spectrum and we leverage it in order to absolutely minimize and
eliminate as many costs as we possibly can for state and local organizations to put their people on these
networks. Years ago we heard numbers of $50 or $80 per cop or firefighter to use a broadband network. That is
just not going to work in my view. And so one of the major focuses of FirstNet is going to be how do we keep
those costs down dramatically? BRIAN GIVEN: Hi, this is Brian Given.
I think we have time for one more question before we move on to the next presentation. If you have
more questions, if there's time at the end we can open it back up or you can e-mail me after this presentation
and we will reach out to Chief Dowd to get those questions
answered. I think we have time for one more question. OPERATOR: The next question comes from Jerry Eisner.
JERRY EISNER: Hi Chief, thank you for your time. One of the slides said that
NexGen 911 call audio was going to be carried on FirstNet.
CHIEF DOWD: Absolutely. Did you finish your question? Or you want to go further?
JERRY EISNER: Well, I'm wondering, is FirstNet going to be used as the
infrastructure, the ESInet for NexGen 911?
CHIEF DOWD: For certain capabilities that would be. When I talk about 911
audio, when I am talking about there is -- in our current state, E911, virtually all our information comes in
by telephone call. So the example I gave earlier of the domestic violence incident, I would like to see us
build in the capability and it doesn't have to be automatic. The officers responding to the incident don't have
to get an automatic download of that 911 audio but if they deem it necessary in order to conduct their field
investigation they could download that audio so that they could listen to it so they could better understand
the incident that they are responding to. That is the thing I was referring to and for that type of incident.
Whether it would carry all of the audio is a different issue. I don't know at this point that we would be able
to do that. But certainly, we want to integrate with next generation 911. JERRY EISNER: Thank you.
BRIAN GIVEN: I would like to thank Chief Dowd for taking time out to talk about this. If
you have more questions, if there's time left at the end, we will be happy to take those questions. If not, we
will provide an e-mail address at the end that we can pass those questions on to Chief Dowd and get those
answered for you. Thank you Chief Dowd. I would like to hand the presentation back over to Ms. Flaherty to
introduce Mr. Patrick Lustig and Kenneth Smith from the Counties of Southern Illinois.
LAURIE FLAHERTY: Thanks Brian. I'm really excited to be able to introduce
these two folks to you who have really put together a
project that I think is innovative and clearly a model for us to consider in moving forward. Our two speakers
today the first is Kenneth Smith, 911 coordinator in Williamson County Illinois and the Chairman of the
Counties of Southern Illinois Executive Board and Mr. Patrick Lustig who is the director for Jackson County
911 in Illinois. He is also a member of the Counties of Southern Illinois Executive Board and the project
manager for their NG911 project. The CSI is made
up of 911 directors from 16 emergency telephone system boards within 15 counties in Southern Illinois who have
organized through an intergovernment agreement to pursue a regional next generation 911 system. So without
further ado, gentlemen please proceed. KENNETH SMITH: This is Ken Smith. Pat asked me to present most of the
information because I have a degree in broadcasting but just because I'm doing the talking doesn't mean I did
all the work. The most unique aspect of our project is regional cooperation. If you have been participating in
the series of webinars you know that most of the early adopters are states or urban areas that have the
authority and resources to do what they need to do. In King County Washington,
there is a statewide ESInet in place, they've got financial resources and full-time
specialist on staff. For my County, I am the GIS guy and the IT guy and the same is
true for most of the members of CSI. Our population for 15 counties is one fourth that of King County alone.
In North Central Texas they have a 13 County project underway and they hired Kimball and Associates, experts
in the field to help them. We had no consultant and at one point asked our members if they wanted to chip in
$10,000 each and they said no, let's do it ourselves. In Vermont they have a statewide authority and the same
is true in Tennessee and Alabama where they're working on statewide projects,
organized and funded by the state. In Illinois, the only state
where the governor makes the license plate, the state is not helping us. But they are
pointing out all the reasons why we should not even do it. If you could switch to the map please. As you can
see from the slide we are rural. We have 12% of the land area of the state and about 3% of the population.
We heard from New York City which reduced it's manpower to 42,000 officers. Carbondale, our largest city at
27,000 has 75 officers. 10 of our 15 members have populations under 20,000. The map shows the participating
counties and we started with five, quickly expanded to eight, and that explains why our data centers are so far
South in relation to the rest of the members. Once we received our first federal grant we doubled in size. Of
those not included three are sparsely populated rural counties that don't have enhanced 911. And the others
were at one time members but they dropped out for various reasons. They thought -- one of them thought NG
was still 15 years way. The counties themselves have no history of working together but the 911 coordinators in
our region do. We have been hosting joint training classes and cooperating sharing information on issues for
years. When Pat first introduced the group to the concept of next generation, we recognized immediately if we
didn't get out in front of this issue we would be left behind. We started the journey seven years ago knowing
that our regional approach was our only hope. Next slide please. We asked ourselves is there a chance for a
statewide system? No. Where the standards finished? No. Do we have the money? No. Do we have any ESInet? No.
Is our GIS ready? No. Is our system provider Verizon going to help us? No.
In fact their replacement actually intervened against us in
our regulatory fight. Would the current regulations let us do it, the answer is no. You are saying there's a
chance? We said let's do it. The alternative was doing nothing. Our state had no plans, our LEC had no plans
and if we try to do it as individual systems, we wouldn't qualify
for the grants. We would have been probably one of the very
last areas of the country to get NG911. The only solution was to do it as a region. Next slide please.
By approaching the issue on a regional basis we hope to maximize cost efficiency, improve our ability to
handle major events and qualify for grants. Even if we each pay $400,000 which we didn't have for next-
generation technology, we still wouldn't have had connectivity to a ESInet. We have invested so far $800,000
collectively including three years of prepaid maintenance as leverage for what turned out to be a nearly $6
million project. Instead of one isolated selective router we have two redundant data centers. Instead of 15
isolated 911 systems most with single PSAPs and only one or two dispatchers working we have a linked regional
system with 21 PSAPs and 47 positions. Our region is in the earthquake zone and is prone to tornadoes. So we
have seen firsthand how quickly a rural 911 system can be overwhelmed by a severe storm or even a train
derailment. When a train falls off the overpass onto an interstate it doesn't take long before the two
dispatchers are overwhelmed. Four years ago today in fact, a storm knocked out power lines and took roofs off
of buildings across three counties. The selective router and PSAPs
were inundated with calls and if another derecho hits we
want to be better prepared. By connecting to our neighbors we assure that no 911 call goes unanswered or gets a
busy signal. 47 answering points and two data centers should make a difference. To me that was one of the main
reasons to approach this regionally. As a big bonus we will be able to
take text, pictures, video and crash notification. But even if
that technology is still a little bit farther away, just being able to back each other up is huge for us. Next
slide please. Illinois has no statewide 911 authority. The Commerce Commission regulates about 180 County and
city emergency telephone system boards and the ICC wanted us to form one big new ETSB but the potential lack of
control would have killed our project instantly. In 2009 Pat Incorporated CSI as a 501C3
nonprofit. We elected an Executive Board with Pat as the project manager, I as the chairman, Jana as a
secretary and Tracy is the treasurer. Were were better organized
but still needed the ICC, nor the LECs recognized us as an entity that
they were required to deal with. The Illinois intergovernmental cooperation
act encouraged the exact type of cost sharing we were attempting,
but we had to get special legislation passed creating a NG pilot project to get anyone
to recognize that. Even then it wasn't until we contracted with an alternate service provider two years later
that we could get any information from the LEC. During the first half of our seven-year project NENA was still
working on standards. So we were shooting at a moving target. That made it difficult come up with an RFP and
we weren't sure what we needed or how much we could afford. The 911 coordinators were diligent about meeting at
least once a month. Some of them had travel times of up to five hours round-trip. A big commitment to stay in
the project. Keeping all the members educated on what was happening was a challenge because so often things
changed everyday. Next slide please. The bigger challenge was each coordinator answered the boards made up of
police and fire chiefs and politicians. That's about 150 non-911 experts
that we had to continually convince to stay the course and keep writing
checks. Our project would end up saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars but
whenever we asked them for $200 for their share of an expense, some of them fought. Pat and I burned up the
highways herding cats for awhile and it's a miracle we only lost
four cats. Three of them jumped ship the first time we asked
for money and that was after they committed to pay their share of the local match on the federal grant. Next
slide please. The third and perhaps largest obstacle for us was money. Southern Illinois best known for high-
poverty and unemployment rates. The Clean Air Act closed nearly all of our coal
mines and the economy closed most of the factories and the prison
and mental health center. With a decline in landline surcharge only a few of the
members had any surplus. Also a real challenge was to determine the fairest way to split the cost. Most we just
divided by 15 but Pat's County has four PSAPs while 10 others only have one. Most of our PSAPs have two
positions but Saline County has five and the population varies from 8,000 to 63,000.
For years into the project the only grant money that was secured was a
$600,000 grant from the Department of Justice. We eventually received more
grant money but we were deep into the project before most of that came through. We used the cost grant for
equipment at the PSAPs. We used $100,000 from the Delta Development
Commission for SIP phones and gateways at the PSAPs but we still needed
to equip the data centers and build out the network. The fourth obstacle was the ESInet to connect our PSAPs to
each other and the data center, you can see that on the screen. Clearwave, the local CLEC
had applied for BTOP money from the NTIA in round one of the stimulus program
but they were denied. In a stroke of luck, timing or brilliance on our
part we partnered with them, actually thanks to our treasurer
who had a close relationship with them. The inclusion of NG911 project helped
separate them from similar projects in other states, so they got $31 million in federal grant money
and $12 million in state match. They spent roughly $4 million to connect our PSAPs
and they offered us rock-bottom prices for broadband access. We're paying $250 per month per PSAP. We had been
looking at spending twice that for DSL connectivity. The grant also included
$1.2 million for hardware and software at the data centers. And we ended up spending quite a bit of that on
session border controllers which we had not anticipated. And also had an extra cost
for excess equipment that was not originally included. So we had to come up with $400,000
matching funds and that's when the three counties dropped
out because they didn't want to contribute $30,000 each. Next slide please. Even though we had a commitment
from Clearwave to build the ESInet, the grant allowed them three years to put fiber in the ground. We wanted
to be up and running way before that. The weather was cooperative but some local officials weren't. Some city
councils balked at granting right-of-way and one member had a financial interest in a competing broadband
company so he refused to let the PSAPs connect to the network. The regulatory delays ended up causing enough
delays to make the build out less of an issue but the member ETSBs were constantly complaining they didn't have
fiber yet or they didn't have the CPE installed. Once they had done both they complained that they had to pay
for both even though the project had not yet been approved by the IT team. Dealing with the timing of those
various pieces of the project was quite a headache over the last few years. Next slide please. Once we knew how
much money we had to spend we were able to choose a vendor. We had originally put out RFI and received a ton of
proposals to look at. Most of them were 100 pages or more and I admit, I didn't read the ones that wanted to
charge us $1 million a year upkeep. One offer just doing the GIS work and others only wanted to host the
solution and provide the network. We had to refine what we wanted and
put out a RFP, that was years before the standards were completed though.
We cut the choices to three and after three months of demos and the deliberation, we determined
that all three options were more expensive than we could afford. We put out a new RFP limiting the scope of
work and cutting out the bells and whistles. Only two proposals were affordable. We selected NG911 INC. in
Williamsburg Iowa, mostly because they understood the regulatory battles and they were willing to fight it
with us. The other one wanted to sell us the hardware and software and walk away.
It was important to NG911 INC. to show the rest of the country that NG would work in a rural regional
setting. But this obstacle was that doing a regional project involved multiple LECs and CLECs in
hindsight, we probably shouldn't have included two counties that had AT&T as their lead telco
and we would've just been dealing with Frontier. We also faced issues with crossing
letters and shared exchanges with the non-CSI members especially
the ones that were part of our project and dropped out and are completely
surrounded. We also faced interconnections with the small LECs as well. For that challenge we partnered with
the Illinois Institute of Technology. Next slide please. They wanted
to get involved as a testbed for NG and we needed their expertise.
We spent just $65,000 in grant money and received probably 10 times that much value from their
geniuses. Their occupancy threatened to limit with the ITT could do for us, the attorneys got involved so
Barbara Camp and Dave Stob had been brought in by Dr. Carol Davis formed Ensure 911 so they could continue to
partner in our project. They designed the network, set up the test plan and configured and tested
our session border controllers. This slide is one of the key things to our
success up to this point, with the ability to partner with people that knew
more than we did. The next obstacle that we faced was to work on our GIS data. We identified and started
working on that early because we needed to form a seamless map since NG routes on map data it was essential
that our data be compliance and accurate. We partnered with experts. This time one of our members was working
on his Masters in GIS so he worked out an arrangement with SIU Carbondale
to use geography department students to perform hundreds of hours of work on our data.
We spent only $80,000 for what would've cost us easily three times that and
have it done commercially. William Barrett from the City of Marion and Melinda Wolker
who's past GIS staffer have done tons of work for the CSI project without any
additional pay. Now the rest of us have a GIS person so each of the coordinators
has been working constantly over the past five years to fine-tune our own data to make sure that it will work
for NG routing. Also as officers in NENA, Pat Lustig is the President and I am the regional
vice president for Southern Illinois. We turned to NENA for help. CSI hired
John Kelly the NENA attorney to help us and Roger Hixson, Rick Jones,
Bob Cobb, from NENA helped our project get recognition from the NG911 partners program. Unfortunately
there are some in the industry that wanted to sell its expert help and they did not want NENA to help us too
much. The NENA recognition did help us to get grant money. NENA has also made strides with the FCC getting them
to recognize that something must be done to make NG possible nationwide. And we can still use their help
with our final obstacle which is regulation. The state and federal laws were written for the legacy copper
network, serviced well for 30 years but they were not written for IP networks and certainly not with the
possibility that a local ETSB or regional association might be able to serve as a provider. We thought we could
save a tremendous amount of money since we already own the NG equipment to be our own service provider.
We were able to get state legislation passed creating a mechanism for the regional pilot
project and spent a year writing plans and testimony and paying attorneys fees
and answering data requests from the ICC staff and from Frontier and AT&T.
AT&T has tried its hardest to stop our project even though they only have a small presence in a couple of our
counties and finally the ICC told us there was no way they were going to let us be the provider no matter how
much money we saved by doing the work ourselves. So we had to turn to Plan B.
Our vendor NG911 Inc. had been our partner in the ICC battles but then they became
our service provider. During the first year of hearings they completed the certification
process to be a provider. CEO Michael Ramsay, project manager Bart Lovett, technician Travis Stender and
attorney Rick Curd went from being vendors to partners and then to providers as the project developed.
We have contracted with them to provide our NG call routing functionality,
database services and network security. They along with Ensure 911
have just completed the network arrangements for the first three counties. Next slide please.
NG911 Inc. had a already set up their own team of vendors for the project. They used data master
for database services, Acme packet for border controllers, ball bearing for the mapping solution, silicon for
the 911 portion, and higher ground for the data reporting.
Negotiating a contract with them was difficult because their role was changing our project from being
our vendor and our partner to then being our service provider. CSI members had been told that they would pay
less for NG because then they had been paying for legacy because we were going to be the provider. When we
were not allowed to be the provider now we were going to have to pay NG and that was a tough sell. In the
meantime, the process continues with trying to get regulatory approval from the Commerce Commission. We ran
into an issue where the phone companies would not give us any information until we had a signed contract with
NG and we couldn't sign a contract with NG until we knew how much it was going to cost and we wouldn't know how
much it would cost until the telephone company started providing NG with cost
information. Next slide please. That is part of our cooperating partners at SIU Carbondale.
Next slide please. I won't go into great detail on the next few slides
since you have seen them before but we're doing everything everything by the book meaning the NENA i3
standards playbook. We have all the functional elements installed at mirror data centers located at the
Jackson and Saline County Sheriff's Department. Circuits from each carrier and central
office run to both centers and there is both a direct fiber connection between
the centers and a redundant system of rings in the event that either center goes down.
We do have a couple of PSAPs isolated at the end of spurs but we're looking at DSL options as a backup for
those. Next slide please. For the most part, our daily activity will remain unchanged. We're not one huge
virtual PSAP where the calls are answered by first available dispatcher. Everyone will continue to answer their
own calls and the ESInet only becomes a factor when there is a heavy call load or a system goes down.
Silicon will recognize when there is no one logged in at a PSAP and
use the call routing table to send it to the next one on the
list. Almost always that someone in the same system or in a neighboring system. Next slide please. We are
pleased with our network security which has been tested extensively by IIT at their lab in Wheaton. They have
simulated denial of service attacks and all kinds of scenarios and the system was secure every time.
If you ever get a chance to participate in any events the IIT have
they have a very impressive lab and are doing great work there. Next slide please.
We also continue to handle database management in the same manner as before. Except that all
the records will be housed together and the GIS data will be combined. Each coordinator will be able to look
at each days update and compare to their own map data and report any inaccuracies for corrections. One of the
flaws in the current system in my opinion is that the LEC will load a new record
if it's MSEG valid regardless of whether or not there's actually a building at that address.
we will validate every insert or change to make sure there is a corresponding address point
not just at the address the customer provided is within the road range.
And I have tried to go little faster than original to try to make up for
lost time and keep us from going over but we are available to answer questions
and I will let Pat step in and answer some also. Thank you.
BRIAN GIVEN: Operator do we have any questions?
OPERATOR: Again ladies and gentleman, if you would like to ask a question press star one. There appear to be --
Actually I did just get one question from Marty Posada.
MARTY POSADA: Hi. Pat and Ken, I had a quick question. I applaud you for everything
that you have been through and where you are going to end up.
You guys have a great system. I wanted to know, when you roll those calls over to one of the
other answering points, did you build your network also include a way for them to dispatch to tone out a
neighboring fire department or did this include radio connectivity also?
PAT LUSTIG: No radio connectivity at this time. However, we have identified that through call handling
agreements, and we will have the ability to contact bordering agencies to dispatch public safety services.
MARTY POSADA: That is awesome. Thank you.
OPERATOR: I'm showing no further questions.
BRIAN GIVEN: Thank you for your presentation and thanks Pat for helping out. We had one question.
You went through the challenges that you faced and how you overcame them. If a state coordinator from
another state or a group of counties from another state either rural or urban came to you and asked what's the
first step to take to become -- to build out an NG system, what would you tell them?
PAT LUSTIG: I think most importantly is commitment. And I think we're seven years in this project, and we have
-- I can only applaud the other 911 directors and their 911 authority. They're mostly telephone system boards
for supporting and committing to the project. I think that is the most important.
There are many issues, regulatory, in hindsight obviously the regulatory issues need to be taken care of.
But most importantly I think just the commitment.
BRIAN GIVEN: Great, thank you.
OPERATOR: We have another question from Roger Hixson.
ROGER HIXSON: This is Roger Hixson and I am the technical issues director at NENA. I wanted to comment I have
been involved with Ken and Pat and their cohorts for a long time on this. Off and on. And I want to complement
them on their willpower. Pat was just talking about commitment and that is a similar thing but they really
held in for a long time to try to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish and do it in a way that I think is
probably the way of the future and the long-range. When we get all these NG911 systems interconnected we will
have a national structure here that really does a powerful job for emergency services in this country and even
beyond for that matter. Canada's doing similar work clearly. I want to complement them on their willpower in
pursuing this and keeping the faith so to speak. PAT LUSTIG: Thank you.
BRIAN GIVEN: I think that's all the time we have for questions. Again, in a minute we will show you some e-mail
addresses to send any additional questions on. We will try to get answers for you. But again, thank you Ken and
Pat, thank you Chief Dowd, and thank all of you for attending today's presentation. We look forward to your
participation in future state of 911 webinars. The next installment will be Wednesday July 10 at noon
Eastern with a presentation from Christy Williams from the North Central Texas Council of Governments
and a still to be determined federal 911 stakeholder. Registration will open in about a month. Again, for more
information on the National 911 Program or to view today's or past events, please visit our website at
www.911.gov and here is Laurie's e-mail address or send questions to NG911wg@bah.com. And we will forward
your questions on to get answered as quick as we can. Thank you very much.
OPERATOR: This does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for your participation.
You can now disconnect. Have a good day.