EL PASO, TX - El Paso County Enhanced 911 Emergency Communications District is deploying In Motion Technology's onBoard Mobile Gateway as the single communications platform to support a County-wide initiative that will improve situational awareness. The technology is currently being installed in 530 County units, both emergency and non-emergency, according to the company.

The system turns El Paso's public safety vehicles into wireless hotspots, providing seamless, secure connectivity to laptops, county-wide CAD system, Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL), E-ticketing, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), mobile two finger fast ID, vehicle diagnostic, and advanced GPS/AVL systems. The Gateway can be equipped with multiple radio cards, allowing emergency communications to be transmitted over the best available and most cost effective wireless network. Radio modules can be easily added or replaced to adapt to the latest network technologies, according to the company.

"We needed a hardware system for our public safety vehicles that had the ability to expand to new technologies, condense the number of modems, and provide the highest bandwidth connection for our applications and devices," said JC Ocasio, network planning manager, Information Technology Department, County of El Paso.

The El Paso County Enhanced 911 Emergency Communications District provides 911 service for the more than 700,000 El Paso County citizens and supports El Paso's public safety entities of police, sheriff, EMS, fire, hazmat, and emergency management. The District provides the county-wide phone systems that deliver the 911 calls to a Public Safety Telecommunicator, a Computer Aided Dispatch system (CAD) that documents and coordinates responder's actions, network connections among various radio systems which promote interoperability and Geographic Information System (GIS) services which provide maps to public safety entities for response-routing and analysis purposes.

The system is partially funded by a federal grant.