OTHER AGENCIES LIKELY TO FUND GETS EMERGENCY PHONE SERVICE
LAS VEGAS -- While bemoaning fact entire $73 million budget for fiscal 2003 for wireless priority access was eliminated in recent Defense Dept. spending bill, Govt. Emergency Telecom Service (GETS) Dir. John Graves told Federal Wireless Users Forum here Fri. that funding would come from somewhere. He said timetable for transferring to Initial Operating Capability (IOC) on Dec. 31 and Full Operating Capability (FOC) following year remained on schedule. Funding options, Graves said, could range from including program in supplemental spending bill or reprogramming of funds within Defense Dept. GETS is wireline equivalent to priority access service, which gives national security and emergency personnel priority queuing on phone networks during emergencies.
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House and Senate conferees recently approved DoD appropriations bill that zeroed out $73 million sought by Bush Administration after Sept. 11 attacks that would fund wireless priority access service system (CD Oct 15 p1). Earlier this year, National Communications System awarded contract to T-Mobile USA to provide priority access service in Washington and N.Y. metro areas, but full fiscal 2003 funding was needed for planned national rollout of program.
“We'll have full operating capacity by end of 2003,” Graves predicted, but he suggested some features might have to be left out if funding issue wasn’t resolved quickly. Among features in “maybe” category, he said, is “'queuing for egress,’ so if somebody has their cellphone on and it’s really congested we can actually put your inbound call into a queue to take the next available cell.” As for long-term and short-term impact of funding issue, he said: “It will have minimal impact on the program… but we're on a fast course and we're dealing with a lot of companies so any type of delay ends up delaying the program… The guys that are making the decision, they don’t know that the software cutoff for Ericsson software development is about 45 days. So if we miss that, we won’t get anything from them in Dec. of ‘03, we'll get it Dec. of ‘04.”
Graves stressed that program remained high priority for White House and National Security Council, saying only potential roadblock to funding would be if bill eliminating $73 million contained restrictive language that prevented funding from other sources. “We don’t think that’s there any nonrestrictive language,” he said, “and if it’s nonrestrictive language, that won’t prevent departments and agencies from reprogramming funding.”
Meanwhile, transition to IOC remains on course. Graves said his department was preparing to notify people via SMS about upcoming changeover Dec. 31 that not only would change procedures and phone numbers key personnel use to access service during emergency, but also would expand program from current Washington, D.C. and N.Y.C. service to coast-to- coast. “This FCC waiver goes out on Dec. 31 -- it’s not going to be renewed so we have to be in position to transition our users,” he said. FCC in April granted temporary waiver of its priority access service (PAS) rules to T-Mobile USA. Waiver temporarily exempted T-Mobile from regulatory provision that users with priority ranking be able to activate PAS on per-call basis by dialing feature code.
Graves said carriers already had overbuilt capacity along N.Y.-Washington corridor for service. He said nationwide IOC contained features that would prevent “load shedding” during high demand and offered access to land lines. “It also incorporates an aggressive algorithm that reserves spectrum for the public,” he said. “The carriers are required to reserve a decent amount of capacity for the public during an emergency,” and service is designed so it won’t appreciably degrade public wireless services in emergency.
Although T-mobile was first carrier to sign on, Graves said he expected other carriers such as Nextel and AT&T to sign contracts “within the coming year… Nextel is very enthusiastic about participating in the program and… a lot of first responders, such as… police… like the ‘push- talk’ feature of the Nextel solution.”