National security and emergency preparedness (NS/EP) multimedia service in a congested network

In anticipation of the emerging migration of the public, circuit-switched telephony networks to Internet-Protocol (IP)-based packet infrastructure, the U.S. government embarked on an effort to develop and implement emergency communications capabilities in the packet-network environment, similar to the priority services currently available in the circuit-switched telephone network. Due to the inherent multimedia capabilities of Next Generation Networks (NGN), these efforts address not only voice telephony but also take advantage of the high bandwidths and intelligent terminals associated with these emerging networks to define additional session-based priority telecommunications services, such as video teleconferencing over the managed public IP networks.