PageOne, a leading messaging solutions provider to the public and private sectors, has secured a new national paging channel from Ofcom for use with local on-site paging systems. It enables PageOne to offer organisations such as NHS Trusts a triple-resilience alerting solution which can reduce on-going costs and deliver an integrated more effective approach to critical and operational messaging.
Traditionally, NHS Trusts have operated independent systems for local and wide-area paging, leading to significant cost and operational inefficiencies. In addition, most NHS Trusts’ current onsite systems operate either on low-band frequencies which are not ideal for in-building signal penetration, or UHF frequencies that have restrictive coverage operating at low power outputs. PageOne's new VHF frequency licence allows it to operate at much higher powers to provide improved in-building coverage, and dramatically reduce the quantity of on-site transmitters needed.
By uniquely combining PageOne’s two-way dual-frequency Responder pagers with an SMS-fall-back capability the solution offers a triple-resilience approach to alerting by integrating local onsite systems with national network services, and has already proved successful with UK Fire Authorities. As well as operating on the on-site paging system as normal, a dual-frequency pager is capable of receiving messages on PageOne's national wide-area network, delivering wider coverage and the added resilience of messages still getting through should the on-site system fail. In the unlikely event that the pager is unable to detect any paging network, the pager notifies PageOne’s servers to automatically re-route messages to the pager via SMS until a paging signal is detected.
The inclusion of two-way paging directly addresses the issue of not knowing whether a message has been delivered, opening up new ways to better manage resource and response. For example, status updates allow staff to use the pager to register whether they are at work or on-shift to improve management and deliver more targeted messages. Responder pagers can also be enabled with GPS location and SOS alert capability to provide peace of mind for staff working remotely such a drivers or community nurses.
“Many existing local paging systems are approaching the end of their lifecycle,” says Nigel Gray, Director at PageOne. “With NHS Trusts in particular challenged to find significant efficiencies by 2015, they are reviewing whether they need to replace existing on-site infrastructure or if a more cost-effective solution can be found. As Ofcom looks to review and potentially re-assign existing UHF frequency bands, PageOne’s new solution provides a more confident and assured approach to alerting for the future.”
