By Ginger Adams Otis
The New York Post
NEW YORK — What the city has here is a failure to communicate.
The newfangled 911 phone system for which the city agreed to pay $195 million can’t handle tests that simulate intense NYPD and EMS call volume — and officials are refusing to let the system go live when EMS dispatchers finally move into a centralized emergency center this June.
Vesta, a call-processing program supplied to the city from a Verizon subcontractor, crashed recently during a load test that pumped 3,000 calls an hour into its phone lines for six days.
It’s set to undergo another load test — this time with 6,000 calls an hour — early next month, but city officials remain skeptical.
The first test results were unacceptable, said Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications spokesman Nick Sbordone, especially for a project more than a year overdue.
“We are very disappointed that the vendors continue to miss deadlines, and with their continued failure to deliver a system that’s up to our highest standards, and further delay the transfer of NYPD and EMS to this software,” he said.
Since last October, the city has pumped 20 million test calls into Vesta, mostly without problem.
But there’s one glitch Vesta consultants can’t work out: At times, the program fails to display the caller’s location, a key feature that city officials demanded be part of the package.
“We are going to demand that this system deliver what the contractors said it could. Until they do, we’re not going to roll it out,” said Sbordone.
The city is refusing to pay the original $195 million contract.
“We’ve only paid $21 million, at the contract signing,” said Sbordone. “We have not made a payment in three years.”
Vesta is part of the extensive upgrade — that the Bloomberg administration first announced in 2004 — of the city’s antiquated 911 system, which included moving all FDNY, EMS and NYPD dispatchers into two high-tech 911 call centers.
The project is more than a year behind schedule, with total costs hovering around a reported $2 billion, well over the original $1.5 billion price tag.
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