VoIP, servers to the rescue

When John Murray came to Oconee County five years ago, he faced a daunting task: overhaul an aged emergency 911 system that included a hardware platform from the 1980s and radios that "were older than most police officers in our department."

Today, the $2.5 million communications infrastructure that Murray designed, with input from a wide range of county officials, includes fault-tolerant hardware and VoIP capabilities and is looked upon by the state of South Carolina as the model other county governments should follow when creating advanced E911 systems.

"We went from the Wright Brothers technology to exceeding the technology of the high-performance Blackbird military plane in one quantum leap," Murray says. "We did that not only at the hardware level, but also at the software level."

The county, nestled in the extreme northwest corner of South Carolina, recruited Murray, a former deputy CIO in the Treasury Department, to be the technical lead on the project in early 2000. The first few years were focused on creating a business plan, getting funding, completing the communications plan and getting necessary county and state approvals.

During that time, Murray formed a public safety communications advisory committee, which included leaders from police, fire and emergency organizations, to be involved in the planning process.

"Because if I give you the best whiz-bang technology in the world, and it doesn't do what you want it to do, it doesn't serve any purpose," Murray says.

Once funding was in place and an overall communications plan was approved, the task was choosing vendors. Final decisions were made a little more than a year ago, and the first phase of the project, which involved putting critical emergency applications on three fault-tolerant Stratus servers and moving everything to the new Law Enforcement Center, went live in July.

In addition, the county deployed an E911 VoIP package that it is beta testing with Positron Public Safety Systems.

"We're the first system in the country to go with voice-over IP for 911," says Murray. In most cases, he says, emergency calls on VoIP don't reach 911 centers, because of technology problems VoIP providers face trying to link to emergency communications services built on traditional fixed-line networks.

"We're the first system to be able to handle not only the standard analog telephone calls, but VoIP calls," Murray says. "So we can take either a data network stream or an analog voice stream."

Those calls are then routed via Cisco routers and patch panels to 13 dispatch stations with HP PCs using 20-inch monitors. When dispatchers enter information into the system during a major emergency, it also is logged on a map on the center's 48- by 84-inch plasma screen, which shows the availability and location of responders.

In addition, the system is set up to enable emergency officials to do "reverse 911" calls to alert families and businesses in areas around a major emergency situation, Murray says. There are plans to link the emergency center with federal databases and create universal interoperability with other public safety agencies, he adds.