Eliminating 911 PSAP Overload and Reducing Hold Times

The Virtual Dispatch Service allows all 911 calls to be handled immediately - regardless of their priority.

We began developing the Virtual Dispatcher Service system to ease the overflow experienced by 911 Public Safety Answering Points during mass disaster scenarios. We were inspired by the hard lessons learned from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey, and the victims' use of social media and instant messaging technologies to try and contact first responders when Public Safety Answering Points were overloaded, causing victims to be subject to hour-long hold times.

In order to ensure that human dispatchers are always handling the most important, sensitive, or complex 911 calls, the VDS has a boost-and-drop functionality that assigns calls to either human dispatchers at PSAPs or an instance of the Virtual Dispatcher Service depending on the severity of the call and other associated factors. This means that the most important or complex calls are handled primarily by human dispatchers, even if they arrived later in the queue.

The Virtual Dispatcher Service also supplies a cloud-based text-to-911 service that is fast, scalable to demand, and fault-tolerant. VDS allows PSAPs to support text-to-911 infrastructure that can be quickly deployed with low overhead. VDS has a strong portfolio of compatible integrations, including various CAD, GIS, and RMS systems such as RapidSOS, ESRI, and more.

VDS ensures that 911 will always be reliable and available at the critical times when users need it most.
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We have been granted US Patent No. 10595183 which protects our technologies. Other patents and foreign patents are pending. The Virtual Dispatcher Service is able to respond to all calls immediately regardless of priority.