Any Dispatcher
In this series of three blog posts leading up to IWCE, we will explain what IP means for dispatching and the features a professional dispatching solution should contain to realize the potential of an IP based solution.
In our last post, we discussed IP dispatching and how that allowed for greater interconnectivity to any type of endpoint. In this post, we will explore the ability for any dispatcher to interface with any endpoint.
The nature of dispatching requires communicating not just with resources in the field, but also with other dispatchers. Groups of dispatchers often need to collaborate on an ad-hoc basis to solve difficult problems, or because of the specialty or level of authority required for a task. This capability is critical to a full featured dispatching solution, but is not present in many of the entry level IP based systems today because of the complexity of the implementation. The best of breed systems, use software based applications to create real-time audio streams and pass unique audio mixes to each dispatcher, so they can each hear all of the other parties involved, but not an echo of their own voice.
This capability is different than a patch. From the perspective of a dispatcher, a patch is one dispatcher connected to many endpoints. A patch can be efficiently created at the dispatcher location, because they are already connected to each endpoint and now want to mix that audio together in to a single stream.
Rather than a one-to-many relationship of a patch, collaboration between two or more dispatchers with an endpoint requires a many-to-one relationship. The audio mixing for this collaboration would most efficiently happen from a central point within the system, not from a dispatcher location, otherwise one dispatcher location would receive significantly more audio traffic than the other locations and that could cause other issues in the system.
The diagram below shows how audio would need to be mixed in order for three dispatchers and one field worker to communicate. The colors of the arrows show the direction of audio flow for each of the participants. Each participant receives a unique mix of audio from the other three participants. No participant has the same incoming or outgoing audio mix as the other participants.
In hardware based solutions this mixing was done with centralized electronics. Dispatchers have come to expect this capability as a standard feature and a core part of how the business functions.
An enterprise class, IP based system should allow any dispatcher to be brought into any conversation. Dispatchers should have the ability to join or leave the conversation as needed. Supervisors who have joined the conversation should have the ability to monitor or even override their staff. All of these features should be unaffected by the geographic location of the dispatchers involved.
Today, there are practical limits to what can be accomplished because of factors such as bandwidth and network latency issues. While working within the laws of physics and the customer’s network capabilities, an IP based solution still offers greater potential for dispatcher collaboration than has been previously possible because it is now economically feasible for dispatchers to be located across a wider geographic range and connected via IP to a common set of endpoints.
In our next post, we will discuss the phrase “Any Time” and talk about how to achieve high reliability with the interconnectivity and collaboration features that were discussed in the last two posts.
Avtec’s Scout is an enterprise class IP dispatching solution with support for dispatcher collaboration features such as the patches and conferences as described above, as well as supervisory takeover. Scout also has user logins. This provides security as well as “free seating”, where a user can log from any location and have access to the tools and endpoints they need to perform their job function.. Dispatcher collaboration happens automatically as new dispatchers join the conversation by selecting the same endpoint. Patches are created by any dispatcher with minimal screen touches for efficient operation. When dispatcher locations are scattered across large geographies and audio traffic must traverse a wide area network, Avtec’s Frontier technology reduces network configuration complexity and bandwidth needs by automatically providing a unicast path across the WAN, and by gating audio transmission to only those consoles with active endpoints. . Scout has the features and architecture necessary to meet the needs of even the largest of dispatching operations.
Sometimes the endpoints and console positions are distributed across a wide area network. Under these circumstances, the amount of bandwidth to support the business needs becomes difficult to model and expensive to deploy. To address this issue, Avtec’s Frontier technology reduces network configuration complexity and bandwidth needs by automatically providing a unicast path across the WAN, and by gating audio transmission to only those consoles with active endpoints. Frontier will substantially simplify networking requirements for distributed applications that require collaboration capability.
Source: Avtec
