New Putnam 911 System Expected To Go Live in May

Putnam County Emergency Communications expect the new 911 system to go live during the first part of May.

Assistant Director Brandon Smith said they are moving into the second phase of testing for operational readiness. Smith said there was a delay in going live due to connection issues found during the first phase, involving wireless callers and the location service provider.

“Rather than going live with a system that could potentially have that vulnerability, we told them to stop, fix the problem,” Smith said. “Then let’s go back in through testing. We did call through testing last week. Call through testing worked great, they intentionally killed that TCP connection multiple times and the connection came right back up.”

Smith said that over the next few weeks, operational readiness testing, training and a go-live team will be scheduled. He said the new system provides updated technology for connecting callers to additional services, run statistical reports and analysis.

“Operational readiness testing, where we will not only answer the call here but we’ll be able to transfer that call out to any center we might transfer to,” Smith said. “We’d be able to use all the functions of the system. Basically stating that every piece of this system is ready to go to work.”

Smith said that the first phase where issues were found involves call routing from a wireless caller’s location to the access center and then onto the 911 center. He said there were issues of connection dropping for 30 to 60 seconds, and sometimes connection was unable to be reestablished at all.

“The only time we would ever lose that connection is if we were to load an upgrade to the system, if we were to ever update the software or if we ever lost our internet connection,” Smith said. “So it’s a rare circumstance where that would ever happen, but if it were to happen that way, callers would get a fast busy signal and would not get an answer.”

Smith said that during testing they were able to test a connection drop and simulate call rerouting. Smith said the new system is called Next Generation 911 Call Handling Solution.