Lucent adds some speed to 911 calling

Lucent Technologies is refocusing its public safety services into one broad venture. During a press conference last week at the company's new Public Safety Systems showroom in Lisle, Ill., Bob Oliver, president of the new venture, announced that a broad package of product offerings will be integrated in an effort to quicken response time to 911 calls.

The system, run on a platform called Palladium, combines computer-aided dispatching, records management, databases and mapping services with a digital answering system that uses ISDN. The ISDN service has so far been deployed in Chicago, New York, Fresno, Calif., and Vermont.

Without ISDN, people wait up to 12 seconds to get connected, often abandoning their calls and redialing, Oliver said. Since the service was set up in Chicago, the "abandoned" call rate has been reduced from 20% to 3% there, he said.

Lucent's new venture also is working toward making it easier to locate wireless phone users who dial 911 and to comply with FCC requirements for wireless 911 calls, company officials said.

The Palladium software, which features a Windows-based interface, is standardized, yet user-configurable. Among other features, the system allows a user to identify dangerous aspects of a particular location, pull up address and phone number lists of an entire area and analyze criminal data.

Gail Shepphard-Armstrong, an information systems administrator for the Wyoming, Mich., Police Department, said this analytical feature has been a primary benefit of the system, which her department has used since October. "We've been able to pull up reports for a specific area and know the types of crimes that have been occurring there," she said.

The system provides data for good community policing, she added: "It helps us give our officers the information they need."