The Challenge: Location is Harder When Work Isn't Tied to a Desk
When an employee dials 9-1-1, the call has to reach the right Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) with a location responders can act on. For a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider serving large enterprises, that promise is hard to keep when employees work from home, hotel rooms, and shared offices, on laptops that move between networks all day.
Clearspan provides UCaaS, POTS replacement, and managed services to large North American organizations. Its PING soft client puts desktop and mobile communications in the hands of those enterprises’ employees. For Clearspan, emergency calling isn’t a roadmap item. It’s a promise to every customer and every end user.
Clearspan’s goal with PING included WebRTC, historically one of the most difficult environments for providing reliable location information because users can access PING via an app or via a browser. Browser-based calling has no fixed network identity to anchor a location to, so traditional approaches fall short. Clearspan needed a partner that would cover its full soft client experience, WebRTC included, rather than carve it out as an exception.
Choosing a Partner When Every Second Counts
Choosing a partner for emergency calling is different from choosing one for any other capability. The cost of a mistake isn’t a support ticket. It’s a response that’s delayed or misdirected. Clearspan looked for a partner that could deliver location management natively inside PING, hold up across every way users connect, and give Clearspan and its customers confidence that their people are covered.
Jim Machi, Clearspan’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer, said “Intrado has long provided the critical backbone that bridges telecom carriers, enterprise systems, and 9-1-1 dispatch centers. It was natural for us to look to Intrado as the partner that would enable 9-1-1 inside of the PING, whether using the PING app or accessing PING via a browser.”
Intrado’s Remote User Location (RUL) service determines and manages the location of users who aren’t on a fixed enterprise network. Clearspan fully integrated RUL into the PING soft client, so location management is part of the client experience rather than a separate step.
Location, Built Into Every Call
Intrado now provides location services for Clearspan PING through RUL, fully integrated into the softclient.
- Remote User Location, built into PING. Locations are managed within the soft client, supporting remote, hybrid, and mobile employees.
- WebRTC support. Location information is available for WebRTC, where it has historically been difficult to provide.
- A technology alliance. Clearspan and Intrado worked together to embed location management directly into the client experience.
