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Northern911's TECHNOLOGY
At our location, we have multiple 911 trunks and redundant routing to answer your calls. If any one of them were to fail, the other stations would continue to operate.
- Multiple T1 trunks to the majority of Bell 911 tandem switches in the province!
- Multiple PRI spans with automatic failover capability.
- An "Infinity" switch is the engine of our telephony system. One of the most reliable and dependable switches available.
- Complete with the latest software and reporting enhancements.
- Dual mirrored drives, dual power supplies, automatic back ups, the works!
- Full duplicate system in a geographically different location.
- Over $500,000.00 invested in telephony and networking.
- All telephone trunks are buried for entrance to the building. We operate on multiple fibre strands, T1 ISDN spans, Centrex on dedicated copper and analogue copper trunks
- We use services from multiple telephone providers for additional reliability
- Back-up phones are available in the event of a PBX failure. If all physical lines to the building are cut, we have cellular phones available for back up.
- Our E911 systems are monitored 100% of the time by Bell Canada 911 Surveillance Group.
Our staff is trained and competent. We know what to do and have years of experience. All Call Takers pass through background screening and a structured training program.
- Minimum of four (4) to twelve (12) Call Taker/Dispatchers 24 hours per day, everyday depending on call volumes.
- APCO Trained Call Takers
- Additional staff available for "overflow"
- Bi-lingual English/French available in house 24/7
- (Although not all dispatchers are bilingual, all shifts have multiple French speaking people available)
- We subscribe to a translation service that provides translation services to 170 other languages
- With four locations and service provided twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, we have over 100 employees.
- In the event that a single dispatcher or a number of dispatchers are off due to sickness or accident, we have other staff members, technical personnel and management who are "on-call"
- Provision of TTY/TTD service for the hearing and speech impaired
In the event that there is difficulty understanding the caller we can instantly replay the call as many times as required in an attempt to determine the problem. We have multiple data terminals displaying the Enhanced 911 data and dual printers to log everything.
- All calls are recorded in our computerized call recorder
- We archive the calls to a mirrored hard drive for safety
- We keep "critical" 911, Fire and Alarm calls for years
- Instant Call retrieval is available for all calls
All of these various computer and phone systems operate on battery back-up systems and in the event of a commercial power loss, we are able to run off the batteries for approximately 4 to 6 hours. If the power outage lasts more than one minute, we have an automatic transfer system to have a natural gas powered generator run the entire building.
- The Electrical grid which powers the telephone system and the computer network is provided by Sudbury Hydro and is extremely reliable in our area. (We provide the back-up site for their overflow calls from their operations centre in the event of an electrical problem in the city.)
- Everything critical at our location is on Battery Back up
- In the event that a commercial electrical outage is a long one, we have a Natural Gas Generator on site
- The generator and the Battery back up is tested under load on a scheduled basis.
We have centralized our equipment spares and have virtually every part on hand. All critical components from hard drives, voice-processing cards to entire computer shelves are covered.
- All computer database records are backed up multiple times on a daily basis
- We have dual redundant network servers
- All critical computers have a redundant unit available
- In addition to the regular daily back-ups, we also take data off-site on a regular basis.
We do "Disaster Planning" and have procedures and regular training in-place to cover many different situations.
- We have a Disaster plan for both total telephone line cuts and/or building evacuation to provide service from an alternative site. We keep a full set of information available at our North Bay office and are able to transfer the calls there in the event of a problem in Sudbury.
We are experienced and understand the critical nature of the service.
In addition to the technical capabilities above, the city has invested heavily in telecommunications and a fiber infrastructure. Sudbury is "wired" and we are connected. We have been told that the communications infrastructure in our city is second to none in North America. Your calls will get through!!
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