At about 2 p.m. on September 25, 2025, dispatch centers across Louisiana and Mississippi stopped receiving 911 calls. A contractor had accidentally cut AT&T fiber lines, and for nearly three hours agencies in two states, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, posted ten-digit administrative numbers on social media and hoped callers would find them. The dispatchers were at their consoles. The buildings had power. The network path was gone. That is the failure a deployable 5G network exists to absorb, and it is the piece most PSAP continuity plans still leave to assumption.

Ericsson Cradlepoint's R1900 is the router built for exactly this class of problem: a ruggedized 5G platform designed for mobile and portable deployments, managed remotely through NetCloud, with a dual-modem configuration that holds simultaneous connections on two different carriers. If one carrier's network is degraded, traffic keeps moving on the other. For a dispatch operation, that is the difference between a backup plan and a backup path.

RCN Technologies builds the R1900 into the Pop-Up Network Kit (PNK), a deployable 5G network in an IP64-rated case: router, Panorama Antennas, pre-activated multi-carrier SIMs, pre-provisioned NetCloud management, and RCN's 24/7 NOC watching the connection. It arrives at the alternate answering site, powers on, and is typically operational within 5 minutes.

How a deployable 5G network keeps a backup PSAP answering

Every serious continuity-of-operations plan names an alternate answering site: an emergency operations center, a neighboring agency's floor, a training room, a mobile command vehicle. The plan usually specifies consoles, seats, and call-handling positions. The quiet assumption is that the site will have dispatch-grade connectivity the moment it is needed. The outage record says otherwise: if the alternate site rides the same fiber, it fails with the primary.

A PNK gives the backup site its own path, with the properties dispatch actually needs:

• Carrier diversity by design. The R1900 Dual PNK runs two modems on two different carriers at once, so a single carrier's regional failure does not silence the site.
• Public safety network access. The PNK works on FirstNet via AT&T SIMs, is Verizon Frontline Verified, and is T-Mobile public safety-compatible, so priority and preemption follow the agency onto the backup path.
• Speed that matches the incident. The kit is typically operational within 5 minutes of arriving on site, against outages that have run two to three hours.
• Eyes on the connection. RCN's 24/7 NOC monitors every deployed PNK, so the agency staffs consoles instead of troubleshooting routers mid-incident.

For agencies that route CAD, records, or other criminal justice traffic through the backup path, the PNK supports the technical safeguards required under CJIS, and RCN can help configure the deployment to meet the organization's compliance requirements.

County governments already operate PNKs at real scale. Harris County Elections deployed 130 R1900 PNKs across its 2025 polling operations, and sheriff's offices and fire departments run them for mobile command. Dispatch continuity is the same discipline pointed at a different room.

What the FCC's NG911 timeline means for continuity planning

The regulatory clock is running. In July 2024 the FCC adopted its first nationwide Next Generation 911 transition rules (FCC 24-78): once a 911 authority certifies readiness and makes a valid request, facilities-based wireless and fixed providers have 6 months to deliver 911 traffic in IP form to designated delivery points, and other covered providers have 12 months. As of 2024, 41 states and jurisdictions already operate Emergency Services IP Networks, and a federal cost study published in April 2026 put the remaining nationwide transition bill at 5.8 to 9.3 billion dollars over roughly seven years.

In June 2026 the Commission went further, adopting a Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on NG911 reliability and interoperability, with comments due August 10, 2026. Among the proposals: requiring NG911 core service and ESInet providers to demonstrate they can hand off calls, with location and media intact, across state lines and between different providers.

Here is what the transition means for a continuity planner. IP-based 911 is more capable and, in important ways, more resilient. It is also more concentrated: the Massachusetts outage was a firewall in an NG911-era system, not a cut copper trunk. The FCC's 911 reliability rules already require covered 911 service providers to certify annually to circuit diversity, backup power, and network monitoring, but a certification has never stopped a backhoe. The layer the rules do not provide is the one the agency controls itself: an independent, multi-carrier network path that can be standing at the alternate answering site before the vendor's ticket clears.