Early Public Safety Network in Bay Area Pushes Against Headwinds to Expand
SILICON VALLEY -- A regional forerunner to the national public safety network is making headway recruiting public institutions to join but meeting more resistance than it thinks it should, an official said. The BayRICS effort in the San Francisco Bay area includes a 700 MHz LTE network called BayWEB, financed with a $51 million NTIA stimulus grant to cover just more than half the cost. The effort is attracting interest from universities “and we're working on” the two holdout cities in Alameda County to join, said Chief Information Officer Clancy Priest of the city of Hayward, which is in the county. “It’s like if you build it they will come.” The initials stand for Regional Interoperable Communication System and for Wireless Enhanced Broadband.
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"This is a really good thing for everyone concerned” -- public safety, the rest of government and the public, Priest said last week at the Bay Area Digital Government Summit. But the question of joining gets hung up with government officials on questions such as the costs and timing of the project, the agreements that must be signed and the responsibilities they bring, he said. One of the holdout cities is Alameda County’s largest, Oakland, so, even with the network, police agencies wouldn’t be able to communicate with one another in an operation like the one dealing with Occupy Oakland, he said.
An unspecified consultant is highly critical of the Motorola technology involved, based on problems with the first digital radios supplied, Priest said in response to a question. “There was a lot of complaint” because the original equipment lacked adequate noise cancellation, he said. Those radios are “so sensitive they pick up all this background noise,” Priest said. “You can’t hear yourself talk.” Motorola gave Hayward’s fire department second and third generation gear to test. He said he was “a little nervous,” because the employees are hypercritical. “I was extremely pleasantly surprised when they came back and said, ‘This works,'” Priest said. “The communication was much clearer than analog, so they were won over by it. … Building penetration is very good, from what I understand.”
"A tremendous amount of controversy” and conflict had to be overcome to create in August 2010 a joint powers authority including all but three outlying counties of the 10 approached, said Dave Kozicki of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Operations. Through the structure, localities including cities that can join for $5,000, “will have purchasing power” for the handsets they will need, but it hasn’t been realized yet, he said.
"Things are starting to move a lot more smoothly” now that the authority has been set up, said Barry Fraser, the interoperability project manager in San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management. It would have made more sense to set the governance up before lining up spectrum and financing for the project, but that’s not how things worked out, he said.
Because the network will be for the use of public safety only, the city’s Sheriff’s Department will avoid problems like dealing with 1 million people at the Giants’ 2010 World Series victory parade without being able to use its communications because “the commercial networks all went down” because “they were completely clogged,” Fraser said. The new network “can prioritize your traffic based on need” and will enable valuable new applications, he said. But it won’t support land-mobile radio, so “we'll continue to have two devices” per user “for at least the foreseeable future,” Fraser said. Participating public institutions must provide Motorola agreements for access to their communications sites, or at least letters of intent, by Tuesday, he said.