Wake County is upgrading its 911 service with a new offering from AT&T that the county and company say will improve the system’s reliability and, at some point, support photos and video.
The implementation of the AT&T ESInet service was announced Tuesday.
AT&T says Wake County is the first governmental unit to deploy the 911 offering in North Carolina.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
ESInet relies on Internet Protocol (IP) based technology.
“Raleigh-Wake continues to grow quickly, and we need to be prepared to meet the public safety needs of our increasing population. We see this as an investment in the safety and future of our county,” said Dominick Nutter, director of the Raleigh-Wake Emergency Communications Center, in a statement.
“Upgrading our technology with AT&T ESInet was an obvious choice. It’ll increase our ability to handle unexpected call volumes, expand how people interact with 9-1-1 and enable us to quickly and correctly route calls and text messages to the right 9-1-1 agency the first time.”
AT&T says the new system enables calls to be routed based on the caller’s geographic location.
“Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs, or call answering centers) will also be able to manage and route advanced communications like text to 9-1-1,” the company adds.
