FirstNet Makes Case for Dedicated Public Safety Network at CES

Public safety communications present challenges, Kennedy said during a Wednesday panel. Voice commands are key, since first responders “might not be able to use their fingertips at all times or take their eyes off the road,” he said. The public safety environment is also tough, he said. “You probably can’t find a noisier, wetter environment to work in,” Kennedy said: Devices “need to be waterproof or you need to be dealing with the fact that you have large saws and noises and generators running in the background at a fire scene.”

Companies at CES should remember that the public safety community in the U.S. offers as many as 10 million customers who now will have their own dedicated networks with unique needs, Kennedy said. “You will have a very targeted market in the U.S. and the rest of the world is doing similar things and headed down this path.”

Assistant Chief Tom Roberts said the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department just dealt with the New Year’s Eve celebration that brought huge crowds to the Strip. Undercover officers in the crowd now communicate via an app, he said. “It’s more important than ever to have a [network] that’s stable, that won’t kick you off, when you have 300,000 people trying to hook into maybe 20 cell towers.” Police in Las Vegas also use a lot of video, with more than 100 public safety cameras on the Strip, Roberts said: “We’re pushing that video through our network to two different command centers,” but also to supervisors in the field. The department doesn’t have the technology today to push the video to all officers, he said.

Chief Information Officer Megan Goodrich said the Los Angeles Police Department has about 1,500 vehicles in the field equipped with video cameras and 2,000 body cameras, with another 5,000 to be added over the next year. “It poses a number of challenges … where a broadband and wireless solution would be really helpful,” she said. “Today, an officer goes back to the station to upload that video.”

A second panel looked at ambient intelligence and 5G. “It’s sort of the marriage of the connectivity of the 5G of the internet of things … with sort of the information intelligence of big data and it’s bringing them together,” said communications lawyer Bryan Tramont of Wilkinson Barker. “That combination has some tremendously exciting possibilities and some incredibly terrifying components to it.” A big challenge “is ensuring that we create a system in which ambient intelligence can be employed and enjoyed by American and global consumers in a way that doesn’t terrify them or cut off the evolution of technology,” he said.

In the new intelligent environment, “objects will need to produce terabytes of data every day that need to be processed and staged to become the basis for decision-making in order to make ambient intelligence work,” said Tramont. “That has tremendous ramifications from a privacy and cybersecurity perspective that needs to be dealt with by policymakers and innovators alike.” By some counts, there could be 45 trillion IoT devices by 2037, he said. “That is a big platform and it’s going to take a lot of capacity and a lot of infrastructure and a lot of spectrum,” he said. “Those are substantial public policy challenges.”

Patti Robb of Intel said 5G at its base is an “aggregator of technologies” using unlicensed and licensed spectrum. “It’s going to bring those together in a more ubiquitous system,” she said. “Never has there been a time where there has been so much change in the network.” Some devices will be very simple, like a sensor or thermometer, and some will be much more complicated like an autonomous car, she said. “Network extremes is something that’s part of 5G,” Robb said. “Longer battery life, the ability to support a lot of different use cases” are all part of 5G, she said. “There are going to be more machines connected in the future than there are actual people.”