Southern Company subsidiary Southern Linc has entered into a partnership with the City of Huntsville and Madison County Alabama’s 911 dispatch center. Southern Linc will add LTE equipment to certain Madison County towers to connect city and county first responders to Linc’s new LTE network. The Huntsville agreement enables Huntsville and the Madison County 911 Dispatch Center (MadCo 911) to use Southern Linc’s LTE network for wireless data transmission.
MadCo 911 CEO and Director of Radio Infrastructure Ernie Blair has been working with Southern Linc to bring wireless data services to his service area via a public/private network partnership for the last two years. “Linc’s new mission critical LTE network is built for reliability and priority, and our agencies will reap the benefit of priority and pre-emption of services when critical events occur. That’s something we need and are not getting today,” Blair stated.
“Because our most important customers are utilities and first responders, we designed our new LTE network to accommodate the need for priority and pre-emption over normal network traffic when emergencies occur,” stated Southern Linc President/CEO Tami Barron. “That means Huntsville and Madison County first responders will get the data they need when they really need it–especially when network usage spikes.”
Southern Linc’s new 4G LTE Advanced network will offer network encryption. In addition, the company is strengthening emergency backup power capabilities with hydrogen fuel cell technology at key locations and adding main power and data center redundancy to further increase the reliability of the new network. Southern Linc plans to begin migrating existing customers to the new network in 2018.
August 18, 2017
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