Land-Mobile Radio Will Remain Critical for Public Safety After FirstNet Built, APCO Summit Hears

"There are many people in this room who are in the mainstream of public safety communications,” said Harlin McEwen, chairman of FirstNet’s Public Safety Advisory Committee (PSAC). “That mainstream is land-mobile radio, that is voice mission-critical communications.” Some “think you can magically abandon” LMR and “jump to the next” technology, he said. “That’s the problem that we are really facing. … We have to maintain these mission-critical voice systems and at the same time we've got to be visionary and look at what is going to come in the future. It’s just as simple as that."

"Mission-critical voice is different than business voice,” said Tom Sorley, Houston’s deputy director-Radio Communication Services. “We just cut over to a $100 million radio system. We didn’t spend that money because there was another solution sitting over here. We spent it because that’s the only choice we had.” Sorley said he’s going to go before the Houston City Council to ask for a doubling of the department’s budget. Public safety communications is built on traditional LMR systems and can’t count on FirstNet as a substitute, he said. “It’s very speculative and as public safety folks we don’t tend to operate out of the edge of how this might work,” he said. “It’s got to work. Until we can know that it works, we can’t go there, and that’s the key to this discussion.”

McEwen said FirstNet seems to be taking PSAC’s recommendations seriously. On Dec. 11, PSAC sent launch requirement documents to FirstNet, he said. In March, the PSAC’s executive committee met with the FirstNet consulting team. “We were given very high level kinds of presentations on various things, various options that are just being considered by the technical team,” McEwen said. “Everything we saw and had a chance to comment on had a basis from these launch requirements. They kept mentioning ‘we did this because you said this.'"

Much technical work remains, said Andy Thiessen of the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences. “One huge place that was left unquantified was the definition of public safety grade,” he said. “That is something that is near and dear to all public safety officials’ hearts.” Thiessen predicted data interoperability will prove “the biggest hairball of all.” In LMR, technology is spread across numerous bands and different technologies and interoperability has been a challenge, he said. “I think that was a cake walk compared to what we're looking at on this LTE network."

Also at the summit, Brett Haan of Deloitte Consulting, program director of the 800 MHz Transition Administrator, said FirstNet should take a page from that process and be as open as possible. Deloitte was selected through an open, transparent process to manage the TA, he said. “We did a nationwide, regional prioritization plan in three months that was put on the public record so that your state and local officials could respond to it,” he said. “That sort of clarity increases your confidence. That way your officials … know what’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen and why and how."

FirstNet needs to be attuned to the states, Haan said. “Fiscally, it will be a new item, a new budget item, whether it’s for a city, a county or a state,” he said. “Make sure that your officials, not just public safety, but administrators and others, can plan for it and budget for it. It will have a fiscal impact on what you want to do.” Procedurally, “many states have biennial legislatures,” he told the APCO attendees. “As you're planning for this, you have to make sure it falls within your cycles."

Stephen Fletcher, association administrator of NTIA’s Office of Public Safety Communications, said further instructions are coming on the new $135 million State and Local Implementation Grant Program, which is part of FirstNet. “There will be probably some changes, or some recommended changes, for all those who applied for grants,” Fletcher said. “We look forward to getting an award for those grants in the middle to end of July.”