FirstNet Learning From Recent Storms, but Top Officials Stayed Away
Between wildfires in the West and hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the need for FirstNet is clearer than ever, Chair Sue Swenson said Thursday: “It’s not lost on us that what we’re doing is ever so critical.” Swenson opened the authority’s board meeting Thursday, streamed from Boulder, Colorado. Vice Chair Jeff Johnson said board members didn’t go to the storm-hit areas, at Swenson’s direction, because they didn’t want to get in the way. “There’s a time and a place for that,” said Johnson, a former fire chief. “As an incident commander for the majority of my career, I can tell you ‘not now’ is my thinking. We’ll talk later.”
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The authority cares about what happened in the disasters and is planning for the future but respects the work done by first responders, Johnson said. He noted that Tom Sorley, chair of FirstNet’s Public Safety Advisory Committee (PSAC), had a ringside seat for Harvey as deputy chief information officer in Houston.
The AT&T team building the network is beating deadlines and “exceeding expectations,” said FirstNet President TJ Kennedy. An example is how disaster recovery is changing, he said. First responders can now have satellite backup in every vehicle if needed and tethered and untethered drones cells on wings versus the old cells on wheels, he said. Fifty drones were deployed in Texas last week after Harvey, he said.
FirstNet will open itself up for innovation for first responders, Kennedy said. FirstNet customers will have access to not just the 700 MHz public safety band, but other AT&T spectrum, he said. “It is an exciting time for the technology industry to really notice that public safety is going to be at the same cutting edge and front-end everyone else is.” New versions of the iPhone won’t use band 14, the key FirstNet band (see 1709130040), but Kennedy predicted a “plethora” of new handsets will.
The authority will hold everyone responsible for the network accountable for making sure the network is public safety-grade, Johnson said. “We’re not going away,” he said. “This contractual relationship we have with AT&T is simply that.”
“Everyone is counting on us,” FirstNet CEO Mike Poth said. “We’ve got to build it and it has got to work.” FirstNet has to hold AT&T accountable on the part of public safety, he said. “This board has set a bar that’s pretty high that the team will continue to strive to hit.”
“We all have a today perspective of what we do,” said board member Kevin McGinnis, a first responder. “It’s the things we wear, the things we carry, the things we know and it’s going to be totally different.” FirstNet will offer devices that can be used to analyze a rural patient from the emergency room, he said. If the hospital decides the patient doesn’t need to be airlifted, “you’ve just saved tens of thousands of dollars,” McGinnis said. “That’s the future mindset.”
Sorley said PSAC members recently met with tribal leaders. “We talked about the tribal consultation, which we hope will be forthcoming imminently,” he said. Also on the table is how to streamline rights-of-way issues on tribal lands to speed siting, he said. “Because they are sovereign nations, the way they interact with the federal government is unique.” Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye spent two hours meeting with FirstNet, Sorley said, and was “very fully engaged.”
In one housekeeping item, the board approved a $73.5 million budget for FY 2018. That's a 13 percent decline from the previous year, FirstNet said.
FirstNet Notebooks
The term public safety grade means something different on FirstNet and an LTE network than it does for traditional land-mobile radio (LMR), public safety consultant Andrew Seybold blogged Thursday. Public safety networks will never reach the ideal of being reliable 99.999 percent of the time, he said. “There need to be fallback modes of operation for public safety so that when things fail they still have ways of communicating,” Seybold wrote. “Today LMR has that type of fallback but LTE does not. Hopefully, in the near future there will be fallback solutions for FirstNet as well.”
NTIA is slated to seek comment in the Federal Register Friday on the reporting requirements for part two of the State and Local Implementation Grant Program (SLIGP). The act that created FirstNet charged NTIA with establishing SLIGP “to assist state, regional, tribal, and local jurisdictions with identifying, planning, and implementing the most efficient and effective means to use and integrate the infrastructure, equipment, and other architecture associated with” the public safety network, the notice said. NTIA awarded $116.5 million in grant funds to 54 state and territorial recipients between July 2013 and June 2014 in phase one. Paperwork Reduction Act comments will be due Nov. 14.