LTE  |  2021-11-12

New Jersey EMS Volunteers Push-to-talk with Inrico

Source: The Critical Communications Review | Gert Jan Wolf editor

HWOL needed a lower-cost and reliable communications infrastructure that could be quickly scaled as the organization expanded.

Hatzalah of West Orange & Livingston (HWOL) is a newly formed, all-volunteer Emergency Medical Service (EMS) in New Jersey, United States. HWOL provides pre-hospital emergency medical treatment and transportation to anyone who needs it, at no cost, 24/7/365 using a unique 2-tier response system that allows them to quickly respond to emergency calls by using first responder vehicles and ambulances located throughout the communities they serve. This ensures that medical care begins before an ambulance arrives. HWOL needed a lower-cost and reliable communications infrastructure that could be quickly scaled as the organization expanded. HWOL required a system that would benefit from over-the-air (OTA) programming and work end-to-end from responders to dispatchers.

To improve the productivity and efficiency of daily communication, HWOL deployed a fleet of Inrico TM7 Plus, T522A and T320 PoC (Push-To-Talk over Cellular) radios over 3G/4G/Wi-Fi networks, which provides instant communications across large areas. All the PoC radios, models with or without the display, run Zello, a widely used walkie talkie APP and software solution, over the T-Mobile 4G network. With the deployment of Inrico radios, HWOL benefits from multimedia communication and long-range coverage, especially when rescues occur everywhere across the communities and staff are always on the move.

Inrico devices have been selected owing to Inrico’s marketing leading quality and feature set. HWOL's dispatchers use Zello Hub platform to seamlessly communicate with responders in real-time and from anywhere in the world. It enables batch programming and upgrading, key management, and permission control to PoC radio through WLAN and LTE. HWOL can easily scale the system by adding more radios and setting up new accounts within Zello.

As an advocate of open ecosystem, Inrico not only designs its PoC devices to be interoperable with 3rd party platforms such as Zello, Walkie Fleet, and Real-PTT, but also develops its own PoC software platform to accommodates devices of different brands.