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New Guidelines for Wireline Emergency Notification Systems in the Works In March, ATIS announced it would be coordinating the development of standards and guidelines for emergency notification systems (ENSs) for use with wireline systems. Robin Meier, the co-chair of the Network Interconnection Interoperability Forum (NIIF) Network Inter-Operability Committee (NIOC), which is developing the new operational standards, says the need for ENS guidelines is growing as more organizations adopt the systems as a way to respond to emergencies.
“Every time I open my paper, there’s some organization, school, or municipality that is utilizing or looking at utilizing these systems to alert the public of emergency situations. The NIOC believes in order for the calls to go through and the emergency messages to reach the intended targets, the industry and emergency alert providers and vendors need to work together,” says Meier.
ENSs are designed to help organizations keep people informed of emergencies by sending out messages to their phones, email accounts, pagers, or PDAs. However, the systems’ messages combined with other communications traffic during an emergency have the potential to compromise telecommunications networks and prevent important calls from completing. During an emergency, Meier explains, the load on a telecommunications network can become overwhelmed, not only with 9-1-1 calls, but also with people affected by the emergency making calls to family and friends and others initiating calls into the emergency area. Making sure that the network is able to handle the increased traffic while ensuring emergency alerts and calls to first responders are able to go through is critical.
Meier believes that cooperation among the various groups that will potentially be impacted by the guidelines is key.
“You get much more cooperation in creating and implementing the operational standards if all the impacted groups work together,” Meier says.
Already, a number of groups have become involved in the effort, including the Village of Mundelein, Ill., police department; the National Emergency Number Association; Reverse 9-1-1; Aizan; Allport Group; MyStateUSA; and ClassCo.
Describing the efforts of NIIF NIOC as multi-pronged, Meier says that its first move will be to send out questionnaires to users of the ENSs and the vendors who develop them. The committee anticipates that the responses it receives will help it get a more accurate view of how the systems are being used.
In the end, NIIF NIOC hopes to achieve a number of objectives, including developing a set of standards and guidelines for ENSs that can be used across the country. This will help eliminate the need for individual states to develop their own guidelines.
The committee is also looking at creating a guide for ENS vendors and manufacturers that would provide them with a minimum set of standards for equipment development; guidelines for municipalities and their vendors on how and when to use ENSs in emergency situations; and a recommended process that ENS administrators can follow during an emergency to notify area telecommunications providers of an event that is occurring in order to better protect the network and assist in call completion.
To learn more about or to participate in the work on ENS guidelines development being carried out by NIIF NIOC, contact the NIIF administrator Geoff Mwaungulu at gmwaungulu@atis.org.
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