Success Story – Public Safety/911

Project Info

For many years the Public Safety/Emergency Management/911 Directors, across the Southern Tier/Finger Lakes region have collaborated and planned for large capacity, highly reliable telecommunication systems that would provide inter-connectivity between County Public Service Access Points (PSAPs), communication towers, law enforcement vehicles, fire and safety assets.

The advent of NG-911 applications with their evolving functionality and bandwidth intensive requirements are the motivation for the Director’s to plan for these robust – reliable communication systems and the connectivity between counties for disaster recovery and redundancy solutions.  In the beginning stages of this planning, the Director’s understood that existing high-cost copper-based and wireless systems that were in-place would need to be upgraded.

Success Story

The Southern Tier Network, when created allowed for an allocation of fiber to be utilized in support of Public Safety applications to benefit the overall safety and interoperability of the Police, Fire and EMS resources in the region. To this end the STN fiber network was designed to connect the founding counties respective Land Mobile Radio (LMR) tower sites to eliminate costly monthly expenses for poor quality copper-based connections. The Counties 911 centers (PSAPs) were also designed to be -inter-connected into a private/secure network.

To date we have 5 Counties and 15 towers connected with the STN dark fiber.   We have construction underway or plans to connect an additional 3 NY and 2 PA Counties to the network. We are planning to launch our first network based, multi-County 911 call processing phone solution supporting Steuben and Schuyler Counties, by year-end 2020.   This will be the first step in what will become a 9-County system.

Having this shared inter-connected 911 call processing phone system in place will improve our interoperability, survivability and situational awareness by requiring the participating Counties to share training, governance and operations of the system. The participating Counties will have the capability of backing each other up in the case of a disaster or regional crisis.

The 911 call processing project is the first of what we hope will be many applications and solutions that the Public Safety vertical will apply with the support of the STN fiber network, connecting LMR and or recording solutions and CAD  (Computer Aided Dispatch) are just a few of the examples.

David Hopkins,

911 Director, Steuben County, New York