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emc2 VOIP Connects Höxter, Lippe and Paderborn
In order to cope with the increase in incident numbers and growing operational demands, the three districts of Höxter, Lippe and Paderborn are expanding the cooperation and partnership within their existing networking project.
After Siemens AG announced that they would be closing down their control center technology business, the district control centers in Lippe, Höxter and Paderborn saw their chance to further develop synergy potentials. In a Europe-wide call for tender, eurofunk was awarded the contract to retrofit and link the existing communication technology and to connect to digital radio.
Work began in the third quarter of 2016. In the fall of 2017, Paderborn was the first control center to go live. Shortly before Easter 2018, the last two control centers also became operational.
In keeping with the saying “All for one and one for all”, the multiphase pioneer project in North Rhine-Westphalia started immediately after the contract was awarded. After an intensive initial planning phase, including approval, the first hardware parts orders were triggered after only twenty weeks. The components were swiftly assembled and configured at eurofunk headquarters in St. Johann im Pongau. After internal quality assurance approval, factory acceptance was carried out at eurofunk headquarters by the technical planning office and the project participants from the 3 districts.
One important point worth mentioning in this project is the migration, which had to be carried out in parallel to the live running of the existing system in the control centers. In September 2017, Paderborn went live as the first control center after extensive and intensive on-site conversion work.
With the go-live in March 2018 of Höxter, the third and final control center, the estimated 805,000 citizens of the three districts can now rely on the best and fastest possible cross-district help. For the three districts, this efficient harmonization of cross-location connectivity also means that new work processes need to be adopted and continuously improved.
However, despite the linking of emergency calls and the intercommunal cooperation between the three districts, the project was far from completed. An additional contract order was received for retrofitting the on-call medical insurance service in the Lippe control center. Following this, the fire and rescue control center in the district of Lippe went live on July 1, 2018.
An important issue currently is the linking of the command and control systems in the three district control centers. Customer preparations for the next Europe-wide call for tender are already in full swing.
