RE: does emergency (911) dispatch uses IP ?

["Naslund, Steve" <SNaslund () medline com>]

That's right.  Check out www.west.com

So, your town will hire someone to put the systems in the 911 center and that might be a company like West or say you 
are a local network provider doing VOIP you could hire west to put in a gateway for you.  State and local governments 
can hire them to maintain the databases behind all of this.   You dump all of your 911 calls to their gateway (which 
also has access to your customer address data) and they will handle all of the routing out of their centers for you.  
They also provide recording keeping an recording services if you want.  Often the first choice from your site to West's 
datacenters is VOIP over Internet, they often then have backup landline routes and any other kind of redundancy you 
want to pay for.  Putting in multiple datacenters and having multiple Internet feeds you can easily outperform the 
reliability of the traditional POTS infrastructure.   This industry really took off when the CLEC/wireless industry 
launched to avoid creating a bunch of duplicative expensive infrastructure to meet the public safety regulations.  
Better to have a few giants like West take on the liability and build a nice infrastructure anyone can use than to roll 
you own and have to keep up with the changing technology.  This kind of technology also allows smaller municipalities 
to get better more advanced systems by purchasing them as a service rather than a one time monster budget hit that 
traditional 911 centers used to be.

One more great thing about doing this is that the network becomes much more flexible and calls can be routed around 
failed centers or center that may themselves be in the middle of a disaster.  

Disclaimer:  I don't make anything from West just know of their services and roll in the industry.  There are others 
that might be as good or better.

Steven Naslund

> Yes.
>
> Look for NENA (National Emergency Number Association).
>
> 20+ years ago, 911 routing required telco connections in each LATA. Some
> legacy (e.g. copper) still uses LATA-based 911 routing, but a lot of 911 routing (i.e. cell, voip, next-gen voice, 
> etc) has been consolidated to a few service providers' data centers connected via IP.
>
> NextGeneration 911 will be essentially 100% IP.
>
> Cost, efficiency, etc.