By Fletch – ENP
Fletch911 Consulting
If you put the world’s best fighter pilot in a hangar full of turbine parts, titanium alloys, and composite blades, the chances are that pilot is not going to know HOW to build a jet engine.
They will tell you exactly how that engine needs to perform, how it should respond in combat, and what it feels like when it fails — but the actual design, the metallurgy, the control systems, and the network of sensors that keep it flying? Those are all entirely different disciplines.
And that’s the exact crossroads where NG911 Public Safety finds itself today.
Use Cases vs. Engineering
For decades, Public Safety experts have been the user community defining requirements they needed, not the engineering folks. That’s not an insult — it’s just the way innovation typically happens. To develop a good product, the people on the front lines must define the mission; only then can technologists build the systems required to support that mission.
But as Next Generation 911 (NG911) and real-time data exchange move away from PowerPoint presentations in the boardroom to actual production and deployment in the field, we’ve reached the point where network engineering and public safety operations have to collaboratively meet and come to an agreement in the middle.
Because the architecture required to move high-fidelity video, IoT sensor data, environmental telemetry, and location-aware alerts isn’t something that a PSAP is likely to build on its own — and, having never actually done the job, it’s not something that a network engineer can design in isolation either.
The Coming Infrastructure Shift
We’re watching the 911 landscape consolidate rapidly. Large technology companies are standing up the core: cloud-native call handling, multimedia intake, and AI-enhanced event orchestration.
That’s good news. The critical core NG911 engine is finally being built.
But let’s be clear, NG911 simply cannot exist without the NGCS Core, but the value of NG911 won’t LIVE in the core — the value of that information lives in the data that flows through the core.
The next generation of emergency communication isn’t about who or what carries the 911 session. It’s about what other Additional Data rides alongside it — building sensors, environmental monitors, MLTS information about the device being used, as well as location metadata, vehicle telemetry, and personal safety information.
That information doesn’t necessarily come from inside the public network or inside a PSAP. It originates from enterprise networks, IoT infrastructures, and connected facilities — the same environments that the world’s networking engineers already design, secure, and maintain every day.
The best pilot doesn’t need to know how to build the jet — but they absolutely need to trust the engineers who do.
Fletch
Where Expertise Lives
Public Safety professionals know and understand their mission better than anyone. They know how to handle the call, calm the caller, and coordinate the response and resources.
But the protocols, routing tables, SIP architectures, and zero-trust frameworks that will carry tomorrow’s 911 data? That’s all network engineering territory.
The same people who build resilient, redundant, and secure enterprise networks used by our financial systems, our Airlines, and our hospitals, are the ones who will ensure NG911’s pipes don’t just exist — but perform at the highest levels where milliseconds matter.
But let’s be 100% clear. This is NOT about replacing the human element of Public Safety. It’s about recognizing that technical execution rests with the engineers, while operational excellence is owned by the first responders.
Public Safety has the mission.
Network engineers have the architecture.
It’s time we stopped pretending one can succeed without the other.
As the industry consolidates around new NG911 cores, the real innovation will come from the connections built above them — the data layers, the orchestration intelligence, and the bridges between enterprise and emergency networks.
That’s the runway I’m working on building.
The World According to Fletch . . . 