DISCUSSION

It was immediately clear that emergency service organizations rely on many forms of wireless technology to do their jobs day to day. Extensive use of pagers, cell phones, and two-way radios were found. In addition, there were a wide variety of vertical applications being used by several early adopters, for instance using Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) capable of looking up criminal records for mobile police officers or Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) phones enabling managers of toxic waste to quickly look up what materials may be in a container or building.
Virtually all emergency services and first responders used some form of wireless technology for emergency service dispatching. There was an inverse correlation found between the size of the field force and the cost of the solution for these services. For wide scale deployments, agencies appeared to place less importance on the latest technology than on other aspects of their services (most often claiming budget restrictions on deployment of advanced technology with a large field force). Given that all commercial wireless service providers charge on-going and recurring airtime fees, less expensive options such as numeric and alphanumeric pagers were seen as minimally acceptable forms of additional communication with many of the larger field forces.
Most agencies reported a need to communicate across departments and across agencies as well as down, across and up existing hierarchies. Westlake has seen, in its wireless consulting business, a recent increase in emergency service requests for proposals (RFP) for solutions to accommodate a much wider capability of communication with special focus on cross-departmental communication. However, the cross-departmental communication layer shown below (Chart 1) was typically managed by more traditional forms of communication and not managed with wireless technology. These included voice (phones), internal proprietary communication systems, two-way radios, Nextel Direct Connect wireless phones and traditional e-mail systems. This traditional model shows a strong message flow of information down hierarchies.