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GCN Home > 08/02/04 issue

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue talks IP

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Replacing an outdated telecommunications system with voice over IP has given Miami-Dade Fire Rescue users more features and flexibility in emergency response.

“But first and foremost, it saves us money,” telecommunications manager Michael Crisler said. “Government will almost always make a decision based on finances.”

The department expects to recoup its $721,000 VOIP investment in less than four years from operational savings, and its success has drawn other county departments to its telecom services.

“We have opened the first countywide 311 information center on IP,” Crisler said. It uses the S8700 Media Server from Avaya Inc. of Basking Ridge, N.J.

When Miami police girded for protests during last year’s Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue ran 10 T1 lines to temporary police command posts and installed 200 IP telephones.

In a demanding environment, 1,800 employees are spread over nearly 2,000 square miles at 65 fire stations in 25 municipalities. They respond to more than 500 emergency calls each day.

Calls from one side of the county to the other over the public switched telephone network are long-distance. “The building I’m in now has three area codes,” Crisler said.

The old key telephone system had no central management. Buttons on each handset connected to individual outside lines.

“It was 25-year-old technology, so it had all the limitations of 25-year-old technology,” Crisler said. “It was maintenance-intensive, and parts were not readily available.”

Migration path

The system had served the county well and was still usable but no longer cost-effective. So when new headquarters were built in 1999, the department bought an Avaya Definity Server SI private branch exchange. The PBX brought the department’s phone system into the late 20th century and was easier to administer. It also provided a migration path to VOIP.

IP telephony—the convergence of telecom and IP networking—no longer is a cutting-edge gamble, said Avaya sales and marketing manager Mack Leathurby. “We’re starting to go mainstream with this.”

In the last 18 months, commercial VOIP service has achieved functionality, security and availability. It has enough of a track record to make a business case, and applications such as unified messaging are helping drive adoption.

Reliability, however, has been a drawback to voice and data on a single network. Then there is a single point of failure, and data networks are notorious for reliability issues. But current products, with redundancy and proper maintenance and administration, can achieve the 99.999 percent availability standard in the telecom industry.