The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council issued Tues...

700 MHz D-block licensee using the 10 MHz nationwide commercial license and 12 MHz of public-safety spectrum. The council “recognizes the reality that implementation of features, functions, and performance standards will be neither immediate nor without challenge,” it said. The network will ultimately be judged on “the speed and quality” of public-safety’s response, it said. The requirements list the areas subject to negotiation before a network sharing agreement can be signed. Providing constant support for the network and devices is one of the requirements. The D-block licensee won’t be able to average out a prolonged outage, the document said. The licensee will be required to set up multiple network operations centers. Public safety must be able to monitor network operations, the council said. Public safety will be able to monitor and record “public-safety applications/service sessions,” it said. “Note that public safety will not likely be able to differentiate personal from work-related communications.” The new system must be hardened “with the same level of robustness as current public-safety land-mobile radio,” the council said, but it would allow the hardening to be phased. How long the D-block licensee will have to restore service following an outage will be negotiated in the network sharing agreement, the group said. The initial draft released in late October was reviewed by more than 256,000 public-safety representatives and attracted more than 400 comments, it said.