Texas University Works on Emergency UC Solution

A Texas University has chosen an Avaya unified communications solution to deliver a nationwide emergency response system.

The Texas A&M University is developing a national Next Generation 9-1-1 emergency communications system and will do so with the support of the Avaya Aura platform.

Avaya Aura gives the right UC architecture to securely make emergency calls and utilize real-time communications like instant messaging, videoconferencing and VoIP. End-to-end Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) will also be utilized.

The university is making use of a $90 million federal grant
as provided by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. There is also a separate $6.6 million grant to build the U.S. Community Anchor Network broadband system and NG9-1-1 infrastructure.

The next step is interoperability testing in conjunction with research by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA).

Walt Magnussen, the Director of the Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center at Texas A&M, said: “With the Federal Communications Commission now taking an assertive leadership role an upgrade of America emergency services communications infrastructure is finally underway.

"As a leading Telecommunications research institution we are delighted to employ the Avaya Aura platform as an emergency unified communications solution.”

The development will mean that emergency response centers can track many different types of media communications, not just phone calls. That means that not only can alerts be processed faster, but contextual information can be transmitted to the right response centre.

For instance if a tornado is approaching a city in Texas, warning bells could be triggered by a tweet or SMS message from someone who has seen the threat materializing in real time.