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Elevate Your Emergency Services with Next Gen 911 Call Recording in Canada

Next Gen Call Recording

For Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) and Command Centres, the recording of interactions are mission critical – they require solutions that purpose built for these environments. The solutions must be easy to deploy and maintain but can also scale from simple single site centres to complex, multi-site environments. It must be purposefully designed for the functional requirements, the technologies found in and the rigors inherent to these environments. And, it is paramount that these systems are reliable.

With intuitive configuration and administration, the Xentrax recording solution for PSAP and Command Center is able to capture, store, manage, organize and replay audio interactions. Moreover, our solution is flexible and cost effective – able to reliably capture, record and synchronize 911 calls – including digital, analog and VoIP calls, conventional and P25 radio, text-to-911 interactions, video, images, console screens, locations from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and feeds from other sources such as CCTV Video. Our solution delivers:

        • Support for Transitional NG911 Networks with SIP trunk logging
        • Designed to NENA’s i3 standards assuring readiness for tomorrow
        • Advanced Call Finder: precision searches that leverage expanded metadata via CAD, D-Channel and other integrations; quickly find calls based on Caller ID, call duration, date and time, user name, incident type or ID, marked calls and a host of other metadata.
        • Powerful reply capability: support for instant replay
        • Foremost security features: AES Rijidael 256-bit encryption, MD5 fingerprinting and other features.
        • Superior Resiliency: multiple redundancy options are available including N+1, 2N configurations
        • Plan based call retention: automatically archive or purge recordings based on plans
        • Flexible storage options: select the right storage solution for your needs [SAN/NAS, EMC Centera, NetAPP Snaplock] using one of 10 available compression algorithms available people

NICE Inform – The move to NG911

If you are a stakeholder in the Public Safety sector, you know that NG9-1-1 will replace legacy or E9-1-1 services on March 4, 2025 and that network providers have already adopted IP based voice services in compliance with the Canadian Radio & Telecommunications Commission NG9-1-1 mandate.

What is NG9-1-1

NG9-1-1 takes an any device, anywhere and anytime approach to delivering 9-1-1 services.  Many understand that NG9-1-1 will facilitate wireless IP based voice, text, video interactions or interactions containing images, but it includes much more including delivery of location information, rules based routing using location, call type, target PSAP and network status as well as other attributes.

For instance, the new capabilities would help police, fire and EMS in managing response to and at the scene of the emergency.  An NG911 system would also be able to quickly reroute emergency calls to another PSAP when the primary answering point is overloaded or experiencing some technical problems.  These advanced capabilities would enhance the ability to provide a more efficient, effective and dynamic emergency responses.

Why and the Benefits of NG9-1-1

Over the last decade, communication technologies has outpaced legacy 9-1-1 network capabilities.  As the world moves from wireline TDM to wireless, IP communication technologies, the need to catch up has compelled public safety authorities to establish a new set of standards to facilitate new and future methods of communications and to this end, North American Public Safety organizations adopted NG9-1-1-1 standards developed by NENA (National Emergency Number Association), the non-profit focused on 9-1-1 operations, technology, education and policy issues.

Canada’s NG911 initiative is based on NENA’s i3 architecture standard (Telecom Decision 2015-531).  NENA’s family of NG9-1-1 standards – with i3 serving as the keystone – enables data-rich, secure, IP-based communications from the public, through 9-1-1, to every field responder.  The new version will serve as the foundation of a 21st Century, broadband-based 9-1-1 ecosystem.

In essence, NG9-1-1 promises to generally drive both greater efficiencies and better experiences by the public.  Benefits include:

  • Provide PSAP’s the ability to process all types of emergency interactions 
  • Capabilities that will help police, fire and EMS in managing response to and at the scene of the emergency
  • Flexibility for the PSAPs and 9-1-1 authorities including transfer of calls, messages and data between any PSAPs on any interconnected NG9-1-1 system anywhere in the country resulting in much faster alternate routing and better control of data flow
  • Other emergency related entities to interconnect to the NG9-1-1 system to receive calls and data
  • PSAPs ability to access a wide range of supportive databases and share new and more robust forms of data
  • Cybersecurity improvements
  • Capabilities to integrate and interoperate with emergency entities beyond the PSAP
  • Support for disaster management and intercommunications with and between PSAPs and other emergency management entities

Xentrax believes that Analytics will play a more essential role for PSAPs going forward and NG9-1-1 will provide data from diverse sources and Artificial Intelligence will become more prevalent as it has in consumer technologies.  AI will be able consume and use data available from NG9-1-1 networks to make intelligent decisioning.  

While there are many benefits expected with NG9-1-1, there will also be challenges ranging from potentially greater exposure to cyber threats, the large amount new data available, as well as the quality treatment of diverse types of interactions by call takers.

NICE Inform and NG9-1-1

NICE is committed to NG9-1-1 support and innovation and experienced in IP based interactions and is an active member of NENA’s Next Generation Partner Program.  NICE is involved in the work related to both defining multimedia logging standards and interfaces as well as interoperability testing.  NICE has successfully completed the Industry Collaboration Event that took place as far back as May of 2010 in which transitional elements of the NG9-1-1 network (ESInet) were tested. 

The NICE solution for NG9-1-1 is centred on the NICE inform Public Safety multimedia application suite; well established with a variety of Public Safety and transportation customers.  It offers the ability to view recorded information from a variety of sources including audio, video and text.  Recorded information can be collected into incident folders, securely stored and distributed only by users granted access based upon view, modify and/or transfer privileges.  

Once centralized in the incident folder, one or more data items from the collection can be authenticated.  NICE applies a digital signature and will detect tampering with any of the incident folder items.  Traceability of actions adds to the security that NICE inform provides – every action taken with the data is recorded and available for review to monitor the interactions with critical incident data.

Multimedia integration is a core architecture feature of the Inform Suite, giving it the ability to add support for future media types while maintaining the same single application to operators.   This architecture allows NICE to incorporate new media types as they become relevant in the future while preserving investment in previous platforms.  Incident information is captured from multiple sources, regardless of its type and format of the source system.  These systems include telephony, radio, CCTV, GIS and AVL information, CAD information, photos taken by cell phones or any other camera, video clips, text messages and documents, and any other information in digital format.  Moreover, multimedia information management by NICE Inform is location independent – each of the aforementioned sources can be integrated into the Inform regardless of its location.

NICE Inform Matrix allows current standalone logging systems to integrate with central, cloud based NG9-1-1 logging systems while maintaining existing onsite logging during the initial transition to NG9-1-1.  In many cases, even if the main 9-1-1 services are recorded centrally, there will be local administration services that need logging.  NICE inform allows a mixture of onsite and cloud logging to be accessed through one application suite

Summary

In summary, NICE offers and NG9-1-1 ready solution to support customer needs in the transition phase and thereafter.  NICE’s NG9-1-1 ready solution includes: 

  • Both active SIP and Passive VoIP logging is supported;
  • A suite of applications that provides a platform for multimedia capture and management from various sources and formats including audio, video, screen text and data;
  • The ability to allow cloud based logging of multiple sites as well as the ability integrate remote/local logging systems with the central logging system;
  • The ability to integrate to third party security systems such as telematics, gunshot detection, access control, license plate readers and others; expanding the information availability for emergency operator and enhancing their situational awareness – essential to taking NG9-1-1 multimedia to the next level;

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