FirstNet Will Get Built, But Needs Help from Industry, Swenson Says

"Public safety recognized the need for this,” Swenson said. “This wasn’t a program that somebody in Washington decided to do.” Public safety “worked incredibly hard to make this happen, in fact they demanded it,” she said. “I think the debate is over. … It’s time to put on the same color jersey and all pull in the same direction.”

Giving public safety priority access to the network and getting the rules right on that is “very, very important,” said Swenson, a retired telecom executive. The network also has to be “public-safety grade,” she said. “It was news to me. But there aren’t really any common standards for hardening, so we're actually working with public safety to try to put some parameters around that.” The network will also have to be geographically specific, she said. “What we do in Mississippi is going to be very different than what we do in California."

How the network will be used by public safety, including for voice communications, still remains to be seen, Swenson said. “I think we're going to have to work with our public safety users and say, ‘What do you need today,'” she said. “If you can have access to data that you don’t have today, what would make your job more effective?"

The FirstNet board needs to do a better job communicating with the public and with public safety, Swenson said. “We're small,” she said. “It’s an unusual situation. The board got created and there’s no company to support it.” One big “myth” is that public safety will have to give up autonomy and control, she said. “That’s not at all what we're talking about,” she said. “It’s not going to be some behemoth FirstNet organization that’s going to decide everything for local fire and EMS and police. We're just a network and a platform."

Another myth is that FirstNet will be too expensive to build, Swenson said. “This is a favorite one of a lot of people,” she said. “This is where you guys come in because one of the things that we're looking at is who can we partner with, what assets can we utilize … so that we can lower the cost to build and we can lower the cost to operate. We don’t have the answers yet."

FirstNet will start in May regional meetings on state involvement, in coordination with the National Governors Association, Swenson said. FirstNet will issue requests for information “over the coming months on a variety of topics,” she said. A request for proposal will be released only after FirstNet finishes its consultation with the states, she said. The board needs to complete its strategic plan first, followed by a business plan, the technical buildout plan and then the operating plan. “All of these are contingent on the first one,” she said. “I can assure you we feel a sense of urgency to get this done,” she said. “But we also know that it’s very important to understand what people need and what the plan should be."

Former FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett counseled patience as FirstNet gets rolling. “It has tremendous potential, but it doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. “I know as soon the FirstNet board got named, the expectations jumped through the ceiling and … they haven’t really come back down yet. It’s going to happen, but we need to give it time.” FirstNet has to be deployed in stages, he said. “It will be rural and urban at each phase, but it will take time and so we have to allow them to have time."

A retired rear admiral, Barnett said there’s a joke in the Navy about the one-hour test someone has to pass at the end of nuclear engineering school. “You open it and there’s one question,” he said. “It says, ‘In the time available, with the materials that you find in your desk, create life.’ Well, I think that’s about as hard as what FirstNet is up against."

Any network has to meet public safety standards, said Jeff Cohen, chief counsel to the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. “Basing this on commercial standards is key to achieving economies of scale and to making sure this leapfrogs public safety, finally, to the level of technology that consumers have, that I have, in my pocket and that the bad guys have too, by the way,” he said. Public safety will need to form working relationships with the carriers represented by CCA, he said. “A disaster or a problem can occur anywhere and you need coverage everywhere,” he said. “CCA members in particular can help fill those gaps and make sure the network can succeed."

The $7 billion allocated to FirstNet by Congress isn’t enough to build a national network, said wireless consultant Andy Seybold, “so the partners are a must if we're going to get this thing built.” The LTE network will be very different than the public safety network with its high towers and broad coverage, Seybold said. “Public safety needs to be educated about all the differences in this and we're trying hard,” he said. “But the commercial operators need to be educated in the differences in the expectations, so it’s a two-way street.” Even with FirstNet, voice over land-mobile radio will remain critical to public safety, he said. “We need to keep that in mind."

John Branscome, an aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said coverage in rural areas is critical. “For Sen. Rockefeller, being from West Virginia, he totally understands that it has to work not only in the urban areas but also in the rural areas,” Branscome said.

For FirstNet to be a success, it needs to have strong collaboration with the states, and use a “state-centric” approach, said Brett Haan, a principal at Deloitte. Governors are key officials to help respond to national incidents, because they can bring up their National Guard units and coordinate with state and local police and first responders, Haan said. Governors also have a “holistic view” of their states’ broadband needs, he said.

With a state-centric model, it will be complicated for carriers to work differently in each state, said Morgan O'Brien, founder of Nextel. Each state has a different political reality, topography and demography, he said. But “the basic building block, just logically, has to be the states,” he said. It’s important, of course, to achieve seamless nationwide interoperability, he said -- that’s “the overriding reason for doing this in the first place.” And the structure is in place for FirstNet to ensure that there’s a “national flavor,” he said, but that shouldn’t be “at the expense of putting the states in at the ground floor."

O'Brien thinks the public-private partnership model can work well in the FirstNet context. Public safety will be “that very elusive thing,” he said: A “customer that does not churn,” but is in fact “the opposite of churn,” that digs in ever more year-by-year on the network. “There’s everything to be gained by this.” Excess capacity on the network is the means by which public safety can finance “the shortfall between the network that it dreams about, and the $7 billion that showed up,” he said.

Utility companies don’t think they'll dominate the buildout, said Brett Kilbourne, Utilities Telecom Council deputy general counsel. “It’s much more important to have a flexible, open and transparent process” that encourages requests for proposals for part or all of the network, rather than a one-shot, one-size-fits-all that “only gives one opportunity to take a bite at the apple,” he said. “We're here to spread the love.”