With the help of Comtech, Strathcona County in Alberta, Canada, transitioned to Next-Generation 911 (NG911) in late 2023 to provide significantly more effective public emergency response capabilities. Comtech has already established itself as a leading call handling provider throughout Canada, incurring confidence in not only our solutions but our team as well, making us a natural fit to support the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) transition to NG911 and play a pivotal role in modernizing emergency services that allow for multimedia data transfer (such as video and text), faster calling capabilities, enhanced security features, and precise location identification, among other services.
Canada is currently undergoing a national, federally mandated migration from legacy systems to NG911 by March 2025 and Strathcona is the one of counties leading the way at this level, which includes all PSAPs serviced by the country’s Emergency Services IP Network (ESInet) providers. Comtech has effectively put itself at the forefront of this critical modernization effort, establishing a competitive foothold as more PSAPs in each province migrate to NG911 to meet the forthcoming deadline.
The NG911 system in Strathcona County will also allow first responders to better assess and react to emergencies with the added layer of multimedia—such as video and image sharing—as well as get to those in need much faster with precise location accuracy, removing costly delays and guesswork that can negatively impact a response to an emergency.
“We are excited to bring the Comtech NG911 solution into Canada,” said Aaron King, General Manager of the Comtech Solacom Technologies (CST) division. “This partnership with Strathcona County creates a gateway for Comtech to provide additional NG911 support across Canada as it pursues its country-wide migration. It also puts us in a position to layer in additional, crucial services such as cybersecurity and data analytics.”
According to Aaron, this is another prime example of Comtech’s commitment to Public Safety and further demonstrates our ability to leverage the company’s complete communications expertise as an end-to-end solutions and services partner—pushing the limits of innovation to find a better way for our customers and the end users of our technologies.
Perhaps most importantly, this partnership reinforces a significant truth, Comtech is a proven public safety technology leader at the forefront of bringing PSAPs and government agencies into the next generation of emergency services. To that end, Comtech is currently working with ESInet providers across Canada to achieve similar results – with Strathcona County serving as a north star for future site migrations.
In the United States, many public safety organizations are also implementing Comtech’s NG911 technologies and services. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is just one more example of Comtech’s proven leadership in partnering with our customers to implement successful NG911 deployments. In Pennsylvania, Comtech has been working with the state’s emergency management agency to deploy NG911 services across the state. In less than two years, Comtech has helped the state complete deployments in 75% of all counties across the state to provide residents with some of the world’s most cutting-edge emergency service rapid response capabilities. This progress is not only a testament to Comtech’s proven technology leadership and differentiated expertise, but the deployment has been so successful that members of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) recently received the Governor’s Award for Excellence, recognizing their work on the NG911 statewide deployment.
As the inevitable global upgrade of these services continues to unfold, we expect Comtech to remain highly competitive and capture even more opportunities. In addition to our NG911 solutions, Comtech also anticipates bringing new and innovative public safety and mental health technologies and services to the Canadian market. As more countries undertake similar modernization efforts, Comtech is in a great position to continue leading the charge.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain information in this blog post contains statements that are forward-looking in nature and involve certain significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results and performance could differ materially from such forward-looking information. The Company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings identify many such risks and uncertainties. Any forward-looking information in this press release is qualified in its entirety by the risks and uncertainties described in such Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
