Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP)

This glossary was last updated on Jan. 22, 2024.

What is a PSAP? 

Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) are 911 call centers for first responders, including the police, the fire department, or emergency medical services.

As of 2021, there are 5,748 primary and secondary PSAPs in the U.S..

Responsible for receiving and processing 911 calls, PSAPs take calls from any landline, mobile phone, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) line. Think of PSAPs as a dedicated call center for answering emergency phone calls and dispatching appropriately.

What is an i3 PSAP?

i3 PSAPs are capable of receiving IP-based emergency calls and are conformant to NENA-STA010 and other requirements. i3 assumes VoIP connectivity and legacy PSAP gateways must continue to be supported alongside IP-based calling. 

Types of PSAPs

There are multiple types of PSAPs, including:

How is Bandwidth involved with PSAPs?

Bandwidth’s 911 Access services allow VoIP service providers to easily reach all the PSAPs in the US and Canada.

Reaching the correct provider based on the caller’s location in a VoIP environment can be a difficult task without a provider like Bandwidth in the middle. Services like Bandwidth’s have many moving parts.

What are the benefits of PSAPs?

When a 911 call is placed, Bandwidth can assess coordinates or location information provisioned to the phone number and compare them to our PSAP boundaries files received from the ALI database. 

From there, we route the call directly to the proper PSAP.

As an additional service, we offer reverse geocoding as another option to provide a physical address of the caller within seconds if coordinates or physical location cannot be provided or provisioned in advance.

Terms related to PSAP

• Area Code Emergency Call Routing
• Coordinate-Based 911 Routing
• EVS 911 Call Routing
• E911
• Automatic Location Identification Database