McCall Fire & EMS adds telecommunications service

McCall Fire & EMS is partnering with a Huntsville, Alabama company to expand the reach of its radio system.

According to the company’s website, TangoTango lets users connect smartphones to radio channels without having to buy specialized hardware.

Integrating with traditional land-mobile radio systems, the service allows first responders to more easily connect with dispatchers and other radio users during emergency situations.

“The McCall Fire District chose to use TangoTango because it leverages technology, saving the district money in costly pager and radio repairs,” said Garret de Jong, chief of McCall Fire & EMS, in a statement. “Our off-duty staff and volunteers can use their cell phones to listen to our radio frequency and transmit on our frequency without needing a pager, radio, or both. We hope that by using this technology, we will get more assistance from our personnel when we need them for emergency response.”

TangoTango services have been implemented in more than 35 states and assisted more than 8,700 first responders, according to the company, and now law enforcement agencies are implementing TangoTango’s services as well.

The system uses networking, mobile, and cloud technologies to expand the coverage and capabilities of our radio systems and to turn any smartphone into an encrypted push-to-talk radio system that includes GPS location services, emergency alerting, recording, fire tones and text/multimedia messaging.

Several other companies have also targeted the first responder marketplace, most recently T-Mobile.

Communication challenges for first responders came to a head during 9/11, when agencies couldn’t communicate with each other because they used different telecommunications services. Since then, there has been an effort to develop a unified system that could be used by all agencies.

On the other hand, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all have their own first responder networks, which continues to make it challenging for first responders to have access to internet, especially in rural areas. Internet access is important because it’s increasingly needed for services such as directions, as opposed to the old days of paper maps. TangoTango is said to work with all standard cellular networks.

Part of the way that T-Mobile promoted its merger with Sprint, which closed in April 2020, was to promise improved service for first responders. Verizon also got a black eye in 2018 when it throttled service to first responders in the middle of a Bay Area firestorm.

Cradlepoint, a Boise-based startup that was acquired in September 2020 for $1.1 billion by Ericsson, also has a first responders arm. Cradlepoint’s public safety products, which are used by Idaho first responders such as Payette County, include routers with dual modems and dual Subscriber Identity Module cards so one device can communicate with four different public safety carriers at once, including AT&T FirstNet, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular.