Sure, you can pick any ESInet provider you want. But that's just a commodity transport pipe. They're all the same.
The real choice happens in the software stack. Call handling. CAD. AI for non-emergency. AI for training. Additional data. Inbound video.
There are plenty of vendors.
The problem is that every choice narrows the next one. Prefer Motorola CAD? They have the rest. Fully integrated. Like Axon's AI and video stack? They have a complete ecosystem. Want to stay independent? Great. Enjoy an endless stream of integration projects.
And it is endless — not just because you have a lot of systems, but because every system is constantly upgrading. The integration debt never stops compounding.
It shouldn't be this way.
NG911 promised a network of networks. NENA published open standards so everything could work together. Interoperability was the whole point.
The promise was real. The execution got captured by vendors.
What's missing isn't more standards. It's a vendor-agnostic data layer — one that normalizes incident data across CAD systems, enables seamless sharing across PSAP boundaries, and puts the data back in the hands of operators.
The ecosystem wins until someone builds the alternative. The integration debt keeps compounding until there is a common layer that doesn't belong to any vendor. That's not a technology problem. It's a governance problem — and it requires infrastructure thinking, not product thinking.
The agencies that are losing choice today aren't making bad decisions. They're making rational decisions inside a system that was designed — intentionally or not — to reduce their options over time.
Understanding that is the first step. Acting on it is harder. But it starts with being honest about what you're trading away with every integration you sign.