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IN THIS ISSUE

PageOne Exhibiting At BAPCO 2010

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Celebrating Page One’s two-way paging system.

SOS System Provides Safety Solution For Lone Workers

Two-Way Pagers To Be MTPAS Enabled

Unrivalled Resilience

Award-Winning Solution 2

Messaging services help EDF Energy Networks to stay in control

Award-Winning Solution

SOS System Provides Safety Solution For Lone Workers

Celebrating Page One’s two-way paging system.

As the first ambulance service to successfully implement two-way paging within the UK, the London Ambulance Service has been awarded the Ambulance Trust Of The Year award at the 2009 Health Business Awards.

Presented by BBC News Presenter Nicholas Owen, the award recognised the London Ambulance Service’s (LAS) quick response to category A calls, where patients are assessed as being in an immediately life-threatening condition.

LAS community volunteers are a vital part of the service on the ground, specially trained to attend a range of life-threatening calls – including cardiac arrests – in their local area, providing first response care during the crucial minutes before an ambulance arrives. PageOne’s GPS-enabled pagers were rolled out across the LAS community volunteer network to improve the speed and accuracy of the volunteer response.

Prior to adopting PageOne’s services, the LAS relied on SMS messaging and mobile phone calls to reach community responders, potentially losing vital seconds in the event of a mobile being switched off or not working. Now, the LAS knows it can deal with any emergency in an instant thanks to PageOne’s two-way pagers.

The pagers include a number of pre-defined responses for volunteers to choose from, and respond with, during an emergency, allowing them to quickly inform the LAS of their availability in the event of a crisis. The GPS feature also allows the LAS to instantly determine where its nearest community responder is so that it contacts the right volunteer in every situation.

The LAS is so happy with the paging system, that it’s now looking to integrate it into its Command and Control system and across voluntary organisations such as the St John’s Ambulance service.

PageOne’s two-way pagers are now able to be equipped with an SOS messaging function, allowing users to instantly send a distress signal to the Command and Control Centre.

An ideal solution for lone workers, such as engineers or care workers, the system is also matched with the GPS capabilities of PageOne’s two-way pagers, allowing the Control Centre to ascertain the broadcast location of users.

Using the SOS system, any user can transmit a distress message to the Control Centre, informing the controller of an incident. The controller can then view that message

and also pinpoint the exact location of the pager’s last known position on a map, in order to organise the most appropriate, local response. The knowledge that a rapid response can be directed to any user’s distress call provides piece of mind and reassurance for lone workers.

The SOS system is also a practical solution for monitoring the movements of lone workers who must maintain a pre-defined schedule. Security guards, for example, must be in specific places at specific times and the pagers can be used to broadcast location updates back to the Control Centre over set intervals.

2. intouch April 2010

Messaging services help EDF Energy Networks to stay in control When thousands of customers are without power, PageOne’s tried and tested mobile messaging system is on hand around the clock to help fix the faults

Supplying customers with round-the-clock energy services is at the heart of EDF Energy Networks’ business. Covering 25% of the UK population across East Anglia, London and the South East, it’s been a proud energy provider for many years, ensuring homes and businesses can power up every time.

Whenever the energy supply suffers a fault, it’s down to the company to locate and fix it as quickly as possible so that the impact on customers is minimal. In particular, high voltage faults can leave thousands of customers without power and need to be addressed right away. PageOne’s Connect system provides EDF Energy Networks’ Fault team with the right communications tool to help staff find, and fix, the problem.

The Connect mobile messaging system is used to send paging messages out to up to 1,200 of the company’s engineers, to alert them of a high voltage incident and get the right person to the right place at the right time.

Fault Manager Kevin Egner is responsible for looking after EDF Energy Networks’ paging solutions and having switched to PageOne in December 2008, he hasn’t looked back. “It’s vitally important for us to mobilise our engineers as soon as possible because we’re measured on customer interruptions and minutes lost against other energy suppliers,” he said. “Connect allows us to do exactly that.”

The flexibility of the Connect messaging system means that EDF Energy Networks has been able to adapt it to its precise needs. This includes setting up location-specific

groups within each of its regions to enable the Operations Control Centre to message engineers within a particular group, depending on the location of the incident.

“High voltage alerts are monitored at the Control Centre and, with Connect, we can now page all engineers within a particular location at the click of a button,” Kevin said. “The messages we send out are also templated within Connect so they’re quick and easy to put together, which is crucial given that we can typically send out between 10 and 20 messages a day.”

Having streamlined the messaging operation, Kevin couldn’t be happier with Connect. “It’s a far more improved system over what we have used before,” he said. “Connect can be adapted and measured like no other tool and as we can target staff in specific locations across our network, we can respond to a high voltage fault in double-quick time.”

Kevin is looking to expand EDF Energy Networks relationship with PageOne and is in discussions about implementing high volume SMS and location-based services across the network, enabling the Control Centre to directly ping engineers’ mobile phones in the event of an energy outage incident.

That’s for the future, though. For now, Kevin is only too happy to sing the praises of Connect. “We’ve seen a marked improvement in our response times and in terms of the number of staff answering a message,” he said. “Paging is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week messaging solution that has really worked for our business.”

Paging

“High voltage alerts are monitored at the Control Centre and, with Connect, we can now page all engineers within a particular location at the click of a button,”

PageOne Exhibiting At BAPCO 2010

Two-Way Pagers To Be MTPAS EnabledBAPCO 2010

With its unique broadcasting ability, unparalleled reliability and speed of communication, paging is at the forefront of our emergency and rescue messaging services.

No other method of contacting people can match the high level of resilience offered by paging, which places very small demands on network bandwidth. These small bandwidth requirements, combined with the unique broadcast distribution method used on our paging network, makes it highly resilient, especially in circumstances that can create public access overload of mobile telephone networks.

It’s this resilience that has led to paging being adopted by rescue

services like The Maritime and Coastguard Agency. When it needs to contact volunteers about a rescue incident, it relies on pagers to get the job done, confident that the message will be received. A single message can be received by thousands of people in an instant, critical in an emergency situation where the slightest delay can be a matter of life and death.

A fast, reliable and innovative communications solution, paging has become the go-to solution for staff involved in real-time messaging environments too. Hospitals and Councils are counting on pagers to deliver cost-effective, instant information to their staff and with its high degree of coverage and resilience, it’s easy to see why.

The Cabinet Office has welcomed PageOne to the MTPAS scheme, providing customers with extra reliability and faster response in the event of a public emergency.

Launched in September 2009, the Mobile Telecommunications Privileged Access Scheme (MTPAS) was implemented to allow communication over congested mobile GSM networks. Originally intended for mobile phones, the scheme was extended to PageOne’s two-way pagers in October 2009. Providing the responder community with a new and resilient communications tool when responding to an emergency, PageOne is delighted to have been included in the scheme.

As a MTPAS provider, PageOne will now supply all Category 1 and 2 responders with MTPAS-enabled pagers. These pagers include a privileged-access SIM card, which

will be automatically activated in the event of traffic overload on existing GSM networks. Providing priority access, PageOne’s MTPAS-enabled pagers will be able to maintain communications with the Command and Control Centre, vital for handling emergencies when mobile traffic overburdens the system.

John Blake, Emergency Response Assistant for the British Red Cross, is clear about the difference MTPAS-enabled pagers will make to the organisation. “As part of the overall operational command and control of assets, paging is going to be an invaluable resource,” he said. “The introduction of MTPAS is going to be a great enhancement as it gives us the resilience that we need in working with Category 1 and 2 responders in real times of crises. We know that we can depend upon the system to put people in the right place at the right time.”

4. intouch April 2010 Paging

New scheme provides PageOne customers with privileged accessPageOne will be at BAPCO 2010 to present its

MTPAS-enabled, two-way paging service, as well as introducing visitors to its location-based messaging tools.

Taking place from 20-22 April 2010 at Islington’s Business Design Centre, BAPCO 2010 is the leading European conference and exhibition event for professionals involved in civil contingency response. The event will promote the development and use of communications and information management systems for the safety and security of the public.

MTPAS is designed to provide authorised equipment with ‘privileged’ access to the UK’s mobile telephone networks, when activated, in the event of a major incident. PageOne will be presenting details of the MTPAS system and how it works with two-way paging on the morning of April 22nd at the BAPCO event.

Location-based messaging allows users to target people within specific areas to respond to any incidents within that location. For example, an engineer can respond to a local call-out quicker and more effectively as they can be contacted instantly about any particular incident. Part of PageOne’s suite of easy-to-use web-based messaging solutions, Flare, it brings the speed and reliability that’s needed in any business-critical situation.

Please visit us at stand 322. If you want to know more about the event, visit the BAPCO 2010 website at www.bapco.co.uk

Unrivalled Resilience