Government Emergency Telecommunications Service

The Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS), established by the National Communication System (NCS) in 1995, provides a nationwide ubiquitous voice and voice-band data service that interoperates with and uses the resources of selected government and private facilities, systems, and networks through the application of standards, and provides access to and egress from international service.

GETS provides priority access and specialized processing in local and long-distance networks. It is maintained in a constant state of readiness to make maximum use of all available communications resources should outages or congestion occur during a crisis. GETS is survivable under a broad range of circumstances, ranging from local to widespread damage, and provides routing, signaling, and network management enhancements that result in a higher probability of call completion in congested networks. GETS augments and improves the public switched telephone network with capabilities that include enhanced routing schemes and priority use of call-by-call priorities over the PSTN.