$700K upgrade to city’s 911 system, paving way for Next Generation 911 in Md.

Photo copyright of Ulrich Meier / Wikimedia Commons/ CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Baltimore city will receive an upgrade to its 911 system worth $700,000 “that includes real-time mapping of calls,” reports the Baltimore Sun.
The upgrade is the city’s part of a statewide effort to upgrade 911 systems, the first step toward implementing Next Generation 911, which will allow residents to make emergency calls via text and multimedia messages, as Technically Baltimore reported in July.

According to the Baltimore Sun, some $50 million has already been spent statewide to prepare 911 call centers for the new 911 service, which will first be available to Maryland State Police.

As part of a nationwide effort, the state is upgrading emergency communications to prepare dispatch centers for what’s called Next Generation 911. The effort has funneled more than $50 million into system upgrades statewide, creating the backbone for systems that could be enhanced to accept text messages, images, video and audio. …
The system will allow caller information to be transferred along with the voice calls from local 911 centers to state police and clear the way for future testing of Next Generation capabilities. [more]

While the $700,000 upgrade doesn’t include the necessary hardware to make Next Generation 911 a possibility in Baltimore city, the upgrade, according to the Sun article, will install “the basics for what officials say will be a secure pipeline to transmit and accept more data.”