Pennsylvania Earns Award for Exceptional Application of GIS Technology

The Office of Public Safety Radio Services (OPRS) operates the Pennsylvania Statewide Radio Network, or PA-STARNet. It provides public safety and emergency response dispatch, as well as wireless voice and data communications, to the State Police, PennDOT and more than 20 other state and local government agencies, regional task forces and business partners. It includes 237 high-profile towers and 640 microcells, which provide VoIP coverage to more than 95 percent of the state's 45,000 square mile land mass and more than 96 percent of its roads.

The commonwealth earned the SAG award for developing an outage viewer that displays the impact of tower outages on communications in a specific area. Most outages are the result of scheduled maintenance. However, towers can also go down unexpectedly due to lightning strikes, vandalism and other causes. Using the outage viewer tool, OPRS can provide users with real-time maps of coverage status, as well as views of future system status based on information about upcoming scheduled maintenance.