With procurement assistance from the California Department of Technology (CDT), the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) made four contract awards to communication vendors to refresh the state-level system that routes 911 calls in California. The awards, finalized Aug. 20, formalize a process that’s already in the early stages — but may take slightly more than three years to complete. Among the takeaways:
• The contracts represent an architectural change to state-level 911 — building in a degree of accuracy and a layer of redundancy that doesn’t currently exist. Today’s 911 system routes calls to a local agency that’s thought to most accurately represent a caller’s location, Paul Troxel, CalOES 911 program management division chief, told Techwire.
The selection of new vendors — Atos Public Safety as the “prime,” overall 911 network service provider connected to the state’s 438 dispatch centers; Synergem Technologies in Northern California; NGA 911 in Central California and the Los Angeles region; and CenturyLink Communications in the south — builds in a layer of security wherein the regional providers route to local emergency response but can be assisted in seconds by the “prime.” The shift, Troxel said, is an acknowledgment of the state’s size and varied environments.
“That’s why we added all of these additional vendors, is just the complexity and the amount the volume of 911. We want to make sure that our citizens are well-supported,” he said, pointing out that California had around 20 million 911 calls last year, with more than 80 percent originating from wireless devices.
• The contract — a five-year pact with five one-year extensions — makes it “effectively a 10-year contract with five years being guaranteed,” Troxel said. CDT was CalOES’s “procurement partner” during a process that got underway with an RFP in February; however, CalOES owns the contracts, and the 911 program management division manages them. Atos’ contract is valued at nearly $198.5 million. Synergem’s contract is valued at nearly $56.8 million. NGA 911’s two contracts have a combined value of nearly $108.6 million; and CenturyLink’s contract has a value of nearly $56.8 million.
The secondaries will rely on the primary vendor, Troxel said, although “region vendors will be responsible to deploy the 911 call to the appropriate 911 center as soon as the call hits their network.” Routing will be based on a GIS data set, capable of pinpointing a wireless caller’s exact location, unlike the current system in which only one agency can be selected for a call.
• Response times are expected to drop, based in part on performance to date. The state’s roughly 20 million 911 calls in 2018 represented a decrease of more than 1 million calls in 2017 — a decrease attributed to wireless routing. WSireless — a statute requirement that mandates CalOES review wireless sectors for 911 calls and evaluate sectors based on the percentage of calls that are transferred.
“Anecdotally, one can make the correlation that yes, it’s going to reduce the overall response time because there’s not a delay from one agency passing to another,” Troxel said.
• Vendors have begun to work in the background; however, the project is expected to get underway in earnest this fall. State officials are currently meeting with vendors, who are working on project deployment plans, which are expected to be finalized this fall. Next steps include site surveys at 911 centers. Once deployment plans are approved, work can begin. Officials have set December 2022 as a target date to decommission the last legacy component of the current 911 network.
