Public safety communications are standing at the edge of a new revolution.

NG911 fundamentally transformed 911 and E911, bringing faster call completion, more reliable location data, and the ability for PSAPs to transfer calls seamlessly. These advancements were made possible by the shift to IP networks and the industry’s adoption of the NENA i3 standard — a framework that has largely been a positive force for interoperability, security, and data sharing.

But while NG911 has moved the industry forward, it has also inherited the DNA of the legacy systems it replaced. The i3 standard is complex, inconsistently implemented, and leaves too much room for vendor interpretation. Deployment varies from state to state — and even vendor to vendor — creating interoperability gaps in a network meant to unify. Credentialing authority remains centralized, concentrated in an organization supported by vendor contributions, leaving room for influence and misaligned incentives.

At the same time, the funding model for 911 has not evolved to match the reality of the world it serves. 911 is still funded primarily by a voice-service surcharge — a model designed for the landline era. Today, more devices send emergency alerts or supplemental data to the network than humans make 911 calls. This is a fundamental shift in the nature of emergency communications — yet the way we fund, govern, and architect the system has not kept pace.

The Problem

The next wave of change in 911 will be defined by two forces: Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things.

AI is already here — answering and triaging “non-emergency” calls, quietly making determinations that a call is or isn’t an emergency. The economic and operational pressures on PSAPs make AI’s expansion into dispatch inevitable. AI agents can be trained on decades of call logs, CAD records, AVL data, and maps to make routing and dispatch decisions with speed and consistency. They don’t take breaks, call in sick, or require overtime pay. The same logic applies to call routing — AI can optimize selective router decisions based on millions of historical calls, easing the burden on network operators.

IoT has already overtaken voice as the dominant source of emergency-related data. From school sensors and vehicle telematics to wearables and AI-generated alerts, these devices are changing the very nature of 911 from a human-to-human interface to a machine-to-machine and machine-to-human ecosystem. But this development brings its own challenges: How do we authenticate and trust the flood of non-human data entering the network? How do we maintain security while keeping the network permissive enough to receive data from millions of devices — at scale and speed? Today’s credentialing systems are centralized, creating bottlenecks and single points of failure.

Overlaying these technology shifts is a structural problem: funding and incentives. Most 911 surcharge dollars flow to incumbent vendors with long-term contracts and entrenched market positions. These incumbents have little financial incentive to integrate or adopt disruptive solutions that could compete with their own products. Innovators are often told to “partner” with incumbents to reach the market — but with a fixed funding pool, partnership often means splitting revenue. And for incumbents, half is always less than the whole.

The result?

Promising technology struggles to find a path to deployment. Pilots stall. Products die before they reach production. And the public safety community risks missing the benefits of the very tools that could solve its most urgent challenges.

The Solution

The 911Trust Ledger (911TL) is designed to address the structural, technical, and trust challenges facing the next generation of emergency communications. It is not a replacement for NG911 or the NENA i3 standard — it is a complementary trust layer that ensures the data, decisions, and processes within the 911 ecosystem are secure, interoperable, verifiable, and transparent.

At its core, 911TL uses blockchain technology to create a decentralized, tamper-proof record of events and transactions across all participants in the emergency response chain — PSAPs, agencies, network operators, technology vendors, and IoT devices.