Weld County Uses New Technology to Locate Mobile 911 Callers
If you have and emergency and you have a cell phone, Weld County can now pretty much find you, no matter where you are very quickly. Weld County’s Department of Public Safety Communications has added a new tool that makes location accuracy for mobile 911 callers more precise. RapidLite is software that pinpoints a mobile caller’s location quicker and more accurately.
If a mobile caller can’t communicate their location clearly, the call drops, or the dispatcher can’t locate a caller, the mobile caller’s phone number is entered into RapidLite’s database; pinpointing the caller’s location within milliseconds. Dispatchers can look up a phone number for up to 10 minutes after it’s received. All residents need to have is an iPhone iOS 12 or Android device and have locations services turned on. That’s all there is to it! But if you don’t have these, dispatchers will still be able to locate you using traditional methods.
How Weld County Used to Locate Callers
Before, mobile caller’s locations were found using cell tower triangulation and
accuracy would depend on the carrier, signal strength, and the actual phone. When dispatch could retrieve the location coordinates from a phone, accuracy came within 30 to 60 feet. If they couldn’t retrieve the location coordinates, location precision could range from three to 10 miles.
81 percent of 911 calls in Weld County came from mobile devices in 2018.