Are You Prepared for Emergencies? Tips to Stay Connected

How will your teams stay connected during an emergency? Do you have a plan? More importantly, are you working with a carrier that has a written plan? Was it well thought out in advance to keep first responders in touch when networks may be overloaded or out of service?

These are all important questions to ask yourself when choosing a cellular carrier for public safety customers.

1. Why is it important to work with a provider that offers its emergency planning protocol in a published guide?
   Public safety teams need a playbook to spell out comprehensive information and insight to your carrier’s response capabilities, resources and protocols. A guide will detail how the carrier plans to support you and the community during an emergency and it’s vital that your team reads and understands this guide so you can incorporate connectivity into your emergency plans. Ask your carrier if they have a guide and discuss it with them.
2. Does your emergency manager know about what happens in an emergency and how their vendor acts and supports them?
   Ideally, the guide will instruct you on how to initiate a carrier’s response and protocol to use during emergencies, plus provide communication strategies, collaboration methods and resources that can be allocated to support the emergencies.
3. Does your carrier provide you priority and preemption during an emergency or times of high traffic use?
   During an incident, whether a natural disaster, emergency or even just a crowded stadium, everyone wants to use their phones to reach loved ones. But that can jam the network and make it impossible for first responders to communicate. With priority and preemption, first responders are given priority over other cellular traffic to ensure you can communicate.

Priority and preemption services are important because they allow first responders and public safety officials reliable and uninterrupted communication during emergencies.

When a network potentially can be overwhelmed due to an emergency, given the amount of massive technology use both from a voice and data perspective, priority and preemption services allow those public officials to remain uninterrupted.

Consistency and reliability are important and more so in a time of need, and the ability to coordinate emergency responses with their teams, using technology and disseminating critical information, is all important to those people in an emergency. Priority and preemption from a network allows first responders and public officials to do that.

The service is free and carriers like UScellular make it easy to enroll by qualifying customers to make sure they’re eligible. Then they provide you a SIM card to insert in your first responders’ devices or use an eSIM triggered on the network to enable priority and preemption.

We operate differently from some of our competitors. Every new tower that we build or enhance already is enabled for data priority for public safety.

Cellular vendors consider all the contingencies when building their network. If something were to impact a tower, backup power can run for hours or days at a time. UScellular, for example, can initiate deployable solutions such as Cells on Wheels or Cell on Light Trucks to maintain network connectivity, though it hasn’t needed to in many years, which speaks to the importance of redundance and the strength of network. Plus, they offer 24-hour support through a network operating center, which also evaluates how the network is performing, anticipates challenges with the network and the best way to ensure customers have access 24/7.

It's important for first responders and other public safety customers think about emergency procedures and a well-planned emergency response. Do you have a checklist of steps to enact? UScellular provides an Emergency Response Guide that leads you through the steps needed and deployable assets used during an emergency.

We also have a dedicated Engineering relationship manager, who a customer can alert to an emergency. We also have someone at the ground level to look at how the network is operating and be able to communicate directly with the customer to give them real-time up-to-date information on our network performance.

In addition, we have our public sector account managers that make sure that there's a dedicated person, single point of contact, should a customer need to reach out.

I think the most important piece is making sure that you have a team behind you in an event of emergency and UScellular does that from the public sector agency perspective.