Vintage only counts for baseball cards and cars

Posted on Nov 12, 2020

Our Director of Marketing has a 1967 Mustang. It's a sweet ride–she likes to share photos of the restoration that has gone twice as long as planned and many times over budget.

Classic cars are cool. But making 53 year old technology stretch the bounds of time and innovation is not without challenges. Original parts are no longer manufactured, and solutions to accommodate today's environment are bolted on and patched in place. It's clunky and inelegant, but it works. Until it doesn't. The pony car was built in a mechanical environment, not a digital one. So while it may have served her grandfather well, it is not the ride that pulls out of the garage when reliability matters.

It goes without saying that your 9-1-1 technology is far more important than your ride. But just like Brandi's pony car, your old technology is failure-prone and not without challenges. The old telcos don't mind if you keep it; 50+ year old technology is 100% profit for them. The public doesn't understand why we need better 9-1-1, and the government isn't quite providing the funding environment to help you get there any faster.

But you know in your heart that to serve your community, you need better and more reliable tools.

That is how we entered the scene in 2015. Our beginnings sprang from a passion for technology and public safety. CEO and founder Don Ferguson started in 9-1-1 with an application designed to connect children and parents to public safety resources when they were needed most.

Don's work required an appearance before the FCC, who asked, "Why not use this technology for Next Generation 9-1-1?" This simple question pushed development to a solution that would truly save lives by connecting people via reliable NG9-1-1 services.

As the scope grew, Don's understanding of the impact better technology could have on public safety became clear, as did the need to switch over to modern, interoperable public safety technology. Don became a member of President Barack Obama's Technology and Innovation brainstorming team to plan the nationwide move away from antiquated technology.

NGA 911 was built in the care of a team with 400+ combined years in 9-1-1.

Are we the new kid on the block? Sure. However, we think that is a good thing. We don't have to break free of legacy thinking to meet ever-evolving technology demands.

As the first installations of Next Generation 9-1-1 started in 2013, our team members experienced those new systems in PSAPs, as Public Safety consultants, First Responders, and network engineers. Today, we are thrilled to be maintained and challenged to strive for the best by some of the greatest minds to come from public safety and tech.

To meet your needs today and in the future, NGA 911 created Next Generation Core Services (NGCS) as a fully compliant i3 solution providing reliability, robustness, security, and ultimately access to more call types. Our solution lives in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud–the same company trusted to serve the likes of NASA, Netflix, the CIA, and more than 2,000 government agencies.

When you hear Next Generation 9-1-1, we don't want you just to think of videos and text. We want you to think about a partner for the journey. One that can give you full visibility into your network's health to see what is happening behind the curtain.

Our dashboards and network views are unrivaled in the industry and something we are proud to show you. We want you to know that you have a dedicated team should there be an issue: no searching for secret numbers and no waiting.

Next Generation 9-1-1 is our jam. It's our singular focus, and we are pretty proud of that.

In a 2019 evaluation of NGCS service providers in California, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Communications (Cal OES) awarded their only perfect technical evaluation score to NGA 911 for their regional deployments. This evaluation included i3 compliance, project management capabilities, deployment capabilities, and ongoing support.

With NGA 911, you now have access to a competitive environment of providers to ensure you secure the right technology and partnership for the road ahead.

Stay tuned! Next week we will cruise into your inbox to share our work in California, Nevada, and West Virginia, plus details about how we leverage the AWS cloud to bring you 99.999% availability.