AT&T's Winning FirstNet Contract Seen Positive for First Responders
By partnering with AT&T, FirstNet assures first responders are more likely to avoid capacity issues in emergencies, consultant Andrew Seybold said Thursday in an email blast. AT&T has much more spectrum available than just FirstNet’s 20 MHz of 700 MHz,…
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Seybold said. “It also has LTE up and running on its own 700-MHz spectrum in band 17, in the AWS band 66, and [Wireless Communications Service] band 30 spectrum. It is also replacing a lot of its systems with LTE in the PCS 1900-MHz band.” That doesn’t mean problems couldn’t occur, he said. “AT&T has to serve its existing customers even during incidents, and it has to make the network available for 9-1-1 emergency traffic. ... Shortage of network capacity during most types of incidents will not be an issue. However, there may be times when AT&T will have to limit the amount of non-FirstNet spectrum being made available to Public Safety.” CEO Randall Stephenson said at J.P. Morgan conference Tuesday he's very excited about deploying the spectrum. “You build this network for first responders, we're going to have to climb every cell site and while you're up on the cell tower, you're going to assume we'll be lighting up all of the spectrum,” he said. “We're basically going to be pre-provisioning a significant amount of capacity as we deploy FirstNet. ... We're going to get a huge performance upgrade as we deploy all this spectrum and bring carrier aggregation to play, and so those three things we'll be executing on heavily over the next 12 months.”