Highlights of the news this week: Washington State, Ohio, and Colorado take FirstNet to task in their comments to the FirstNet Draft RFP. It is interesting to read these comments since some that I filed are along the same lines. I took issue with FirstNet’s rural coverage, with its data rate and capacity requirements as too low, and of course, I really balk at making this network into a commercial network with telephony, texting, MMS, plus data and video from the start. What Public Safety needs, I believe, is to have a data and video ONLY network, using the commercial networks for telephony and texting at least until they get their feet wet with the capabilities and learn their way around the network.
It is obvious to me, and I am sure to many others, that the RFP was written in sections by different people with differing views of what FirstNet is and how it should function. The various appendices and requirements documents are not clearly and concisely written, and nowhere did I find what I would call an overview of the objective of what the FirstNet network will be and where it will be operational.
So of course I will provide my own overview below: The purpose of the FirstNet network is to provide data and video services (to start) to both the Public Safety community and to the customers of one or more partners that respond to the RFP. In rural areas it will be built out to provide coverage that matches and exceeds the coverage provided by the two largest commercial operators. This expanded coverage may be provided by the best possible means including LTE RAN with satellite backhaul, boomer sites where appropriate, with the use of high-power mobile modems and vehicular repeaters capable of operating on highly encrypted Wi-Fi in-vehicle devices. Within the major metro areas the network will be built to provide data capacity to provide for multiple personnel responses to incidents within confined areas that are covered by one to two cell sectors.
The network is to be highly encrypted to meet the latest standards available at the time of RFP award and both the basic network and the applications will be encrypted using different encryption methods. It will be up to the RFP respondent(s) to design the network, identify the number of cell sites required, and provide FirstNet, the states, and the Public Safety community with an overview of the coverage that will be provided at the onset and at the 3 and 5-year build-out dates.
I am sure this could be rewritten a hundred different ways but the idea is to provide a concise overview of what the overall coverage and capacity should be. I would also include a section on states and vendors being able to add cell sites, both outdoors and inbuilding at their own discretion and cost as long as they can be integrated into the overall network. I hope FirstNet takes heed of the comments made by the three states and others since the states can choose to opt out. The more potential there is for states opting out the more difficult it will be to find a few partners (bidders) willing to get this network up and running.
In all fairness to FirstNet, a network this ambitious and with such little funding has never been tried before, but the RFP should be cleaner and free of much of the clutter it contains. Let’s focus on the outcome. I think what is lost here is that a typical government RFP is for services or widgets and every single detail needs to be nailed down because the feds are paying the vendor. In this case FirstNet is NOT paying the vendor, the vendor is essentially partnering and spending $billions of its own funds in order to share in the unknown amount of spectrum FirstNet will not be using for Public Safety. The RFP should be more friendly and it should be the starting point for across the table discussions with those vendors that have expressed an interest in this project. Continue reading →
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National Public Safety Telecommunications Council 