Simon Hendery

Simon Hendery

Despite Skype's phenomenal success - or perhaps because of it - internet phone technology is still viewed with suspicion.

VoIP (voice over internet protocol) is considered by many to be nothing more than a cheap and nasty option for saving money on international toll calls.

So when Dean Zanone, a former Californian police sergeant, comes to New Zealand to preach the benefits of IP as a communication tool to improve the effectiveness of our emergency services, can he be serious?

Zanone is dead serious - in a very affable, easygoing West Coast way.

Now retired from the Seal Beach Police Department, where he oversaw the building of an IP emergency services network, Zanone works for communications technology giant Cisco Systems.

He was in New Zealand last month to speak at an emergency management conference in Wellington about how such systems can enhance public safety by improving emergency services' communications networks.

As he points out, the self-preserving nature of the internet - a connection between two points can be made via whatever path happens to be available - makes it a very robust communications platform.

The most poignant example of where IP has shone when other communications networks have failed came out of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

With the city's phone networks down, the deputy mayor went on the scrounge through an Office Depot store for IP telephony gear which he then used to rig up a VoIP line that enabled President George W. Bush to call Mayor Ray Nagin.

"The data networks that were already in place were robust enough to shift over to voice traffic so they could have communications between New Orleans and Washington because everything else had failed," says Zanone.

His vision is that police, fire and ambulance services will increasingly use IP for voice, video links and data sharing.

"If you look at [emergency services] voice radio systems, how much time is spent with one person describing to another what they're seeing, trying to get that situational awareness or that view, when maybe a voice radio system isn't the best way for them to have a view. Maybe it's video, maybe it's GIS [geographical] information, maybe it's access to a database," he says.