At Northern911 our mission is to help peoplein their times of need. It’s what we do all day, every day. We achieve our mission by providing reliable, efficient, and accurate services backed by advanced technological systems. We strive to never have a single point of failure.

Specifications:

  • Full duplicate system in a geographically different location.
  • Primary and back up 9-1-1 T1 trunks to the majority of Bell 911 tandem switches in the province.
  • Multiple PRI spans with automatic failover capability.
  • We have dual redundant Firewalls/Network Switches. The “Infinity” switch is the engine of our telephony system. One of the most reliable and dependable switches available.
  • Dual mirrored drives, dual power supplies, automatic backups, the works!
  • The telephone trunks use diverse paths 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 and internet 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 Northern911 and the Bell Canada 911 Surveillance and Monitoring Centre.
  • All equipment spares are centralized and all critical components from hard drives, voice-processing cards to entire computer shelves are on hand.
  • All computer database records are backed up multiple times daily.
  • All critical computers have a redundant unit available.
  • In addition to the regular daily back-ups, we also take data off-site daily.

Call Recording

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 get clarification. We have multiple data terminals displaying the Enhanced 911 data and multiple virtual printers to log Information.

  • All calls are recorded and logged.
  • We archive the calls to our Storage Area Network for safety.
  • We keep “critical” 911, Fire and Alarm calls for a period requested by our clients.
  • Instant Call retrieval is available for all calls.

Emergency Power System

Our computer and telephone systems operate on a dual Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems and diesel powered generator back-up systems. In the event of a commercial power loss, the UPS systems will bridge power to all critical devices until the generator activates via an automatic transfer switch and powers the entire building.

  • The Electrical grid which powers the building is provided by Greater Sudbury Utilities which is extremely reliable in our area.
  • The Diesel Generator and the UPS back up system is tested under load on a scheduled basis.

We strive to never have a single point of failure.

We do Disaster Planning and have procedures and regular training in-place to cover many different scenarios. For example, 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 secure off-site location and can transfer the calls to this location in the event of a problem in Sudbury Ontario.