Case Study
Emergency Dispatch
Sugar Land FD Sends Fire Station Alerts over IP
Zetron IP FSA Improves Alerting Speed and Reliability
The Sugar Land Fire Department recently upgraded an
important tool to ensure that its firefighters would continue
to respond quickly and efficiently to calls for service. One
goal of the upgrade was to uphold the department’s average
emergency response time of 5 minutes 25 seconds.
In 2006, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Sugar Land
third on their list of “100 Best Cities to Live.” In 2007, CQ Press
ranked Sugar Land fifth on its list of “Safest Cities in the United
States.” And in 2008, Forbes.com dubbed Sugar Land one of
the Houston area’s “Top Suburbs to Live Well.”
“We were using an older version of the Zetron alerting
system,” says Brad Porter, IT project manager for the
Sugar Land Fire Department. “We knew that technological
advancements were now available that would enable us to
continue providing the high level of services our community
expects.”
Sugar Land FD
With the help of Zetron reseller, Northwest Radio, Sugar Land
installed Zetron’s IP Fire Station Alerting System (IP FSA). The
new system offers state-of-the-art features and functionality.
Its alerts sent over Sugar Land’s fiber optic IP network are fast
and reliable. In addition, the new system provides automatic
indications of alert success and failure.
Prior to installing the new IP FSA system, Sugar Land FD
had been running Zetron’s Model 6/26 Fire Station Alerting
System over a leased, dedicated telephone-carrier wireline
infrastructure.
A livable city
Sugar Land is located in Fort Bend County on the Gulf Coast of
Texas. It has been recognized numerous times as one of the
most livable cities in the country.
The Sugar Land Fire Department (FD) provides fire and
emergency services to the city of Sugar Land. The department
includes six fire stations (with a seventh under construction)
and an administrative offices building. The department has
about 120 employees, 100 of which are certified fire fighters.
The alerting system hardware had been installed in the 1990s.
Over the years, the department’s computer aided dispatching
(CAD) system had undergone numerous hardware and
software upgrades. Porter determined that the department
would benefit from installing new alerting equipment that
would better match their current CAD system.
“This would also give them an opportunity to obtain a VoIPbased system that would utilize the city’s fiber-optic, widearea-network instead of the leased telco lines,” says Northwest
Radio owner, Don Cameron.
The proposal process
Once the decision was made to install a new fire station
alerting system, Sugar Land issued a request for proposals.
Each proposal they received was evaluated according to a
weighted set of criteria that included the proposed system’s
scalability, ability to operate over a WAN, and ability to
interface with Sugar Land’s existing CAD system.
“After evaluating all submissions,” says Porter, “we selected
Northwest Radio’s proposal to install the Zetron IP FSA
solution.”
The solution
This solution for Sugar Land would include:
• Zetron’s IP FSA Server application.
• Three positions of Zetron’s IP FSA Console.
• Six Zetron IP FSA Model 6203 IP Fire Station Units.
“The IP FSA system processes the same command that our
CAD sent to the 6/26,” says Porter. “So it was just a matter of
moving a cable from the 6/26 to the IP FSA system. Northwest
Radio configured the server and station units with our settings
in their lab, then set the system up in our computer room and
on our network for a second certification. The final milestone
involved installing the station units in each station and
recertifying system in the field.”
The system passed all of the required certification tests.
Exceeding expectations
“IP FSA has been in service for about 60 days, and it’s been
reliable and trouble free,” says Porter. “We haven’t called tech
support, and we haven’t had to reboot the server. In addition,
its Windows interface is so easy to use that our dispatchers
learned it very quickly.”
“With the IP FSA system,” he continues, “we no longer worry
about alerts. The system automatically polls the fire stations at
regular intervals, so our dispatchers know that the stations are
online with the server. Our communication links and alerts are
no longer in doubt.”n
A painless deployment
After Northwest Radio won the project, they met with Sugar
Land to create a project schedule and set milestones for the
deployment of the new system.
“The deployment was painless because we had a good plan;
all we had to do was execute it,” says Porter. “For instance,
one milestone involved cabling up the fire stations, another
involved cabling up the dispatch consoles and installing
brackets for the touchscreens.”
The next set of milestones involved installing IP FSA in a
laboratory setting so they could test the server and all six
panels with the CAD interface.
“Rick Perez of Northwest Radio installed the IP FSA server and
made sure that it was correctly integrated with the existing
CAD system,” says Cameron.
An easy migration
In addition to their project plan, another factor that simplified
the transition to the new system was the fact that IP FSA is
designed for an easy migration from the 6/26.
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005-7594B February 2014
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