London, 17 October, 2013 – PageOne Communications, a leading messaging solutions company to the public and private sectors, today announced that County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service has selected its Responder 2-way pager, supported by dual-frequency paging with SMS fall-back to add the ultimate in flexibility and resilience to their critical alerting process. The solution is helping County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service to improve the management of over 180 retained Firefighters and Officers, by extending the scope of communications even further to connect with staff located beyond the local fire station’s transmitter range.
“We needed a solution that would allow us to communicate more effectively with our retained staff,” says Lee D’Arcy, Telecoms Manager at County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service. “They can sometimes be situated outside the remit of our on-site transmitter, which obviously presents a number of communication challenges. Ultimately we are also looking to improve business resilience and implementing PageOne’s 2-way solution not only allows us to communicate more effectively, but also delivers intelligence on multiple levels,” added Lee.
With dual frequency technology specifically developed to leverage the synergies of both local and wide area paging, coverage can be widened and extra resilience can be added to critical communications in the most cost effective manner. The technology works by expanding the remit of messaging with wide area paging by locking onto a preferred paging channel, for example a Fire Services’ local on-site paging transmitter. If this is no longer available, it then scans to PageOne’s national paging network. In the unlikely event that the pager detects neither the local or national paging channels, it reverts to SMS fall-back mode to receive messages and notifies PageOne’s messaging gateway which then automatically redirects paging messages via SMS, creating a triple layer of resilience.
The selection of PageOne’s triple alerting solution followed an extensive trial by the Service. “We have built a good relationship with PageOne over the years and trust in them to deliver a robust service, able to meet our demands,” says Lee. “Given the current financial pressures, the trial gave us the opportunity to justify the investment, but also demonstrate future savings from costly projects to build our network infrastructure,” added Lee.
PageOne’s 2-way Responder pagers uniquely combines the strengths of paging and GSM/GPRS to offer powerful two-way messaging capability, acknowledged messaging, with optional emergency SOS button and GPS-based positioning. “The technology offers us considerable insight. We now know when a message has been delivered, read and staff can even reply using a pre-defined set of responses,” says Lee.
The 2-way Responders also include a ‘Book On and Book Off’ feature, in essence a dynamic rostering function, allows staff to update their availability status depending on their shift or capacity to work and pass the information through to the RDS Retained Duty System . “This feature is invaluable to us as it allows our call-out staff to confirm their status and for command and control to mobilise the appropriate staff to incidents,” concludes Lee.
“We are delighted that that County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service has selected PageOne’s Dual Frequency 2-way Responder pagers with SMS fall-back to manage their retained call-out staff and improve business resilience,” says Nigel Gray, Director at PageOne. “Our messaging solutions are at the forefront of delivering intelligence, helping our customers to stay better-informed and make smarter decisions when mobilising Fire Crew and Officers to an incident. The new Responder solution also offers a sustainable alternative to the expensive replacement of legacy systems,” says Nigel.
