Latest Customer News - - - from Iowa - - - from Minnesota
Iowa PSAP Avoids High Cost Redundancy
When the Monona, IA Law Enforcement Center recently decided to upgrade PSAP capabilities, Rick Dean, E9-1-1 Administrator, began by rounding up all the usual suspects.
"We evaluated all of the E9-1-1 systems going, but by comparison the Palladium's™ capabilities were phenomenal. Other systems, one in particular, were so redundant, that their cost was three times that of the Palladium™."
"What the other systems offered was a restricted in-house approach. What we needed was a system that would interface with a telephone company database, with the contingency that if their database went down we could use our own backup database."
"The Palladium™ system accommodated that. It's more flexible and a heck of a lot more simple. We need redundant protection and Palladium™ has that. But Palladium™ cuts down on the amount of redundancy -- the excessive redundancy that adds to the cost and complexity of the system.""Here for example, we've configured the Palladium™ with three trunk lines, with a line card for each. If one of the line cards goes down, the other two cards automatically take over. We get an on-screen notification there is a card down, and we can, without disruption, replace that card. There's no outage. It's fantastic. And even if a computer faults, the system goes into what I would call a manual state. Other systems don't offer a fail-safe like this."
Redundancy Issue Bears Repeating
The accompanying graphic represents the methodology used in the
Palladium™ System components to provide fault protection.
Minnesota Telco Taps into Scalability
What Hutchison Telephone Company has done is unprecented. Not only did the company become the first telco outside of the RBOCs to become a 9-1-1 service provider, it has grown it 9-1-1 subscription base by 1000% in less than two years. "The timing was right," explains Tom Dahl, Operations Coordinator for HTC. "And the Palladium™ technology was there to help us grow."The Right System at the Right Time
"We chose Palladium™. We were a small company. We needed a system we could grow with, and grow large. In the beginning, we were doing business in our county. Then the Seven Independent Energy Services group formed and that took 9-1-1 statewide in Minnesota. Then we began speaking to four other states who wanted the service. So we went from a county based service, to a state service, to a multi-state service. And the Palladium™ system accommodated that growth."
Hutchinson Telephone offers everything in the way of 9-1-1 services, including PSAP, CAD, and database installation, plus training and system maintenance. Palladium™'s modularity has strong appeal to the growing subscription base, but it was the system's scalability that sold Dahl and his telco associates. "I've seen million dollar systems that cannot provide this kind of simple scalability," says Dahl. "They don't grow. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of small systems where you have someone's PC and yes, it's small, but it doesn't provide the growth capacity."
Why Are Competing Systems Less "Scalable"?
The answer, according to Dahl, is because more expensive systems are excessively redundant. "The expensive systems we looked at are essentially fault tolerant systems with the redundancy of two power supplies, two memories, two screens, two cables, two back planes. Two of everything. They pride themselves on being able to take a shotgun or rifle and drill holes into the cards and the memory and say look, it's still running. But inherent in all that redundancy is the staggering cost of scaling up for larger capacities. In contrast, Lucent's Palladium™ system addresses redundancy and scalability in a cost effective way."
Lucent Listens
There's a big difference, according to Dahl: "I can tell you for certain that it's been good for my business. I think Lucent is more flexible.
It used to be we would ask and they would tell. Now they ask us what we need and we tell. The scalability of their ALI system is a perfect example.
And when it comes to support and getting answers, I can't imagine any one question I've had that wasn't answered in a thoughtful way, with my needs in mind."
For more information on the Public Safety line of products, telephone
- 1-800-FIND-911; or contact a Lucent Technology Customer Team;
- or send email to this 5ESS®-2000 Switch home page site.