In countries prone to fire, and sometimes catastrophic fires, such firefighter strike teams are a crucial aspect of civil defence and safety. In such circumstances, volunteer firefighters receive alerts to attend a fire as part of a strike team, and then rapidly assemble at a fire station to roll an equipped fire fighting truck with its strike team complement.
Infostream supplies all the component parts necessary to implement such systems, either on a site-specific basis, or on a broader statewide emergency network basis.
A complete solution involves the following components:
Transmitter Base Stations
Most state-wide emergency services systems rely on dedicated networks, rather than relying on existing commercial telecommunication infrastructure. There are three very important reasons for this:
- The emergency services network is designed to operate in an emergency when it is a matter of life or death as to whether messages get reliably transmitted. Such networks are designed to work under peak overload conditions. In contrast, commercial networks are designed for normal range circumstances and get easily overwhelmed in an emergency. In addition, commercial telecommunications networks can find it difficult to assign priority to emergency traffic, as their control operations may not be integrated into the emergency dispatch and control centers.
- Dedicated emergency services networks are designed to be resilient to failure, and to continue to operate during extreme conditions. In contrast, it has been the experience in most major emergencies that the first networks to fail, and the last networks to recover, are the commercial networks.
- Dedicated emergency services networks are designed to provide coverage into remote areas, and to ensure almost total statewide network coverage. In contrast commercial networks tend to focus on where the population lives, and their network coverage in remote rural areas may be sparse.
In addition, public safety systems in hazardous sites cannot use GSM-based devices and micro-cells – they are not intrinsically safe, and it is simply too dangerous to use anything but a dedicated low power and safe network when personnel may be in the presence of gases or explosives.
Emergency Services networks consist of a system of interconnected Base Stations. If these are statewide, they must be carefully positioned to enable accurate coverage across the terrain, and must be coordinated in terms of frequency and timing to ensure the efficient operation of the network and the pagers. If they are local to a site, care must be exercised in the location and design of the transmitters so that appropriate coverage occurs in all buildings and circumstances on the site.
Infostream manufactures Base Station Controllers, Cypher Transmitter Encoders and Simulcast Network Encoders as part of its integrated network offering. These can be coupled to commercial transmitters to form a complete integrated Base Station.
VIPER Alerting System
The second part of a complete solution is an Alert Management & Message Control System in the form of a Paging Terminal. Infostream designs and manufactures a complete solution under the VIPER brand that is purpose-built for emergency services and firefighter callout.
VIPER Enterprise is a high-reliability system (five nines availability) that can manage hundreds of thousands of pager devices, and many hundreds of Base Stations. It supports the industry-standard paging protocols of FLEX and POCSAG, and has the capacity to rapidly create and alert flexible work teams through its group alerting functionality. For smaller site public safety environments, Infostream supplies smaller versions of VIPER that are appropriate to the size of the network being managed.
Viper has a sophisticated queuing and priority system, which can be used to ensure rapid delivery of crucial messages
Pager Receiving Devices
The last piece of the solution is the delivery of exactly appropriate devices. For public safety personnel operating in hazardous environments, the X5-i is purpose-built to conform to the exacting demands of these circumstances. For broader emergency services personnel, the X5-w or the X5-s is an appropriate choice – both are water resistant which is a necessary requirement as many emergency services circumstances involve exposure to wind, rain, floods and dust.
