Visibility and remote troubleshooting for rural next generation 911 locations

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A North-central State in the USA needs to upgrade to the Next Generation 9-1-1 framework, but while for big cities there is budget and technical infrastructures, there is no affordable solution for troubleshooting network issues in remote locations. The risk is to leave various areas of this State with diminished emergency coverage in case of network issues.

“Next Generation 911 - known as NG911 in the public safety community - is the future framework for 911 call delivery in the USA and Canada, to upgrade the ability for people in distress to use modern technology and send data such as text messages and photos to help first responders more quickly locate people in need. NG911 is a closed digital (IP-based) 911 network that is standards-based, scalable, secure, redundant, and built to meet the needs of public safety.” - Explained the IT Manager in charge of the migration.

The Next Generation 911 digital framework will require network management from one or more data centers per city, but it does not offer an affordable solution for remote locations or small villages, which are very numerous in this North-central State in the USA. These locations cannot afford to have a dedicated data center, but most probably will rely on a dedicated server or small groups of local people to make sure the 911 digital service is available. In case of a network issue, hard to reach locations will have to wait for an expert to be sent to the place, resulting in call quality degrading, or dropped calls or, in the worst-case scenario, leaving the community/area at high risk as the emergency service might not be fully available. If time represents a security issue, also the costs of maintaining the 911 service will be quite high in case of issues.

The IT department of this North-central State in the USA selected and deployed in several strategic locations a customized version of IOTA - the award-winning all-in-one network traffic monitoring solution. Being easy to configure without the need for on-site technical staff, IOTA provided the customer detailed network traffic visibility to critical applications and data, allowing them to obtain real-time and historical network traffic without affecting the network performance and security.

“Network application problems now can be resolved remotely and quickly, with full packet and metadata analysis.” – said the IT Manager in charge of deploying the solution

• Network performance is maintained by keeping a close eye on the most essential performance metrics, retransmissions, packet loss, latency, throughput, availability, and connectivity.
• Monitor network hosts, top talkers, bandwidth, latency, TCP, UDP, IPv4, IPv6, VLAN and DNS using a premade and intuitive set of comprehensive dashboards.
• Track down security flaws with full visibility over 200+ applications and protocols (DNS, HTTP, SSH, Office 365, Skype, Whatsapp, Netflix, etc.)
• Fully managed over HTTPS and with built-in VPN, offering easy deployment and usage in any network topology.
• Diagnose remote problems without on-site assistance.
• The monitored network is isolated from the management interface, and therefore helps to avoid any risk of injection of MITM attack through the device