APCO releases Project 43 report
APCO International has released its Project 43 report, which assesses the effects mobile broadband will have on the operations of public safety access points (PSAPs).
Work began on the report in April of 2016, and involved nearly 80 member practitioners assisted by APCO professional staff arrayed across several working groups focused on the areas of operations, governance, cybersecurity, technology, training and workforce.
According to APCO, the goal of Project 43 is to “help public safety telecommunicators, PSAPs, PSAP directors, 9-1-1 authorities, elected and appointed officials, and others in the public safety community better leverage existing technology capabilities and prepare for the evolving broadband communications technologies that will impact PSAP operations and, at the same time, improve support to field responders”.
Among the report’s findings and recommendations, are:
- Public safety communications professionals are and will remain essential to emergency operations, and deserve appropriate respect and recognition at the federal, state and local levels.
- PSAPs should be able to break the cycle of proprietary, one-off solutions; reject the assumption that public safety products require costly enhancements to achieve interoperability; and must demand interoperability as a baseline expectation.
- Recognising that PSAPs will “quickly morph into fully integrated command, control, and communications centres with capabilities that include basic intelligence collection and monitoring, 9-1-1 multimedia traffic processing, full scale dispatch, and incident command capabilities”, they should therefore be known as Emergency Communications Centres.
- NG9-1-1 RFPs and federal grant programs should use widely deployed commercial standards to ensure seamless interoperability, and any standards used in addition to widely deployed commercial standards should be approved through organisations such as ANSI.
- Congress should establish a substantial grant program to modernise 9-1-1 services across the country as a national imperative [to] help ensure that all PSAPs have the resources needed to upgrade in approximately the same timeframe.
The full report can be found on the APCO website.
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