The United States and Canada started planning for the Next Generation 911 (NG9-1-1) in 2000 and published the plan in 2001 in its National Emergency Number Association (NENA) Future Path Plan. The project was started in 2003, with the first step was the development of operations and architecture standards. Then in 2016 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) started a public survey about the services that were to offer and how they would be offered to the public. Numerous US states also started deployment of various version of NG9-1-1 in 2013.

One of the most important benefits of the NG9-1-1 system is the transferring of calls and texts to other alternative respondents during the state of disaster, such as earthquake and hurricane. The system is known as Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).

PSAP connects all emergency respondents, such as 911 centres, first responders, and trauma centres, and during any disaster, emergency calls are routed through all active responders for effective service.

One of the examples includes the smart emergency network of Vermont, which connected its eight PSAP’s and during the hurricane, which took place in 2011, and damaged one of the PSAP. So the smart network was able to transfer the emergency calls from the damaged PSAP to other active PSAP’s and was able to facilitate the respective emergency calls.

Some of the other advantages of NG9-1-1 includes smart tracking, getting visuals, operate with other respondents, add flexibility to the traditional emergency system, increased public access, cost-effective, and increased reliability.