I recently spoke with Roger Hixson, NENA’s Technical Issues Director, about the roles that vendors play in regards to E911 development. 

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Erin: Why is NENA leading the NG9-1-1 effort as the standards-setting organization for the 9-1-1 industry?  

Roger: A number of years ago we recognized that the current E911 system design would not be able to efficiently handle the evolution of IP-based telecommunications and the growing variety of communications methods that the public would expect to use to contact Public Safety for emergency assistance. Today, there is an increase of wireless only households and an even larger number of consumers that rely on wireless service as their primary means of communication. 

A large and growing number of these consumers are using devices that provide voice, video and data.  In the 90s and early 20xx years, we were able to adapt E911 to support cellular and VoIP changes, but doing so required lengthy timeframes during which 9-1-1 service for these types of service was limited.  We need something that can react quickly to new forms of emergency communications, and provide improvements in 9-1-1 service capabilities. 

NENA and its Public Safety and 9-1-1 industry members represent the history, experience, and talent to determine how to define a new approach to 9-1-1 call processing that takes advantage of current and future technologies which can meet the needs through a standards-based design.  

Erin: What is the importance of NENA’s members? In what capacity do they affect the NG9-1-1 process?

Roger: NENA’s Public Safety and 9-1-1 industry members are the experts on 9-1-1 services and procedures.  They are the core of both operating 9-1-1 call and data processing systems in North America and using them to deal with more than 250 million 9-1-1 calls each year.  The importance to NENA members ranges from being able to meet consumer expectations to the economic realities associated with sharing data in an IP environment and certainly, there is the need to plan for the future.

Erin: What is the role of vendors in the process and their importance to standards development, particularly as regards ICE-1 and ICE-2?

Roger: Many of the vendors in the 9-1-1 industry take part in the NENA consensus development work to help defining NENA standards, which are the basis of NG9-1-1 interoperable emergency communications. Vendors provide the software and integration of components needed to build NG9-1-1 systems.  The NENA ICE program for interoperability testing is vendor defined and managed under NENA auspices, and provides vendors the opportunity to cooperatively test components and interfaces among themselves, so that Public Safety purchasers have selection in a competitive and open standards based vendor environment.

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It is important to note that one vendor actively participating in the NG9-1-1 process is RedSky Technologies. Volunteers from vendor members chair the numerous committees required to keep the process of standards development moving forward. Bill Mertka is RedSky’s (News - Alert) vice president of product management and he has served as chair and co-chair of the committees that organize the Industry Collaboration Events (ICE) that bring together NG9-1-1 vendors and their equipment to test draft versions of the new standards. 

Thanks to these efforts we can expect further development within this important industry.