FirstNet’s CEO on 5G, priorities in 2022 and what’s next
Edward Parkinson this year is celebrating a full decade of work on what is today FirstNet. Roughly ten years ago he was a staffer for former Rep. Peter King of New York, working on the legislation that would eventually create FirstNet. He then joined the nascent agency in 2013 as its chief of government affairs – FirstNet’s third employee.
After serving as an acting CEO in 2018, Parkinson was named the organization’s permanent chief executive in May 2019.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have seen this program evolve from an idea to its passage, to the law,” he said.
FirstNet, of course, is the First Responder Network Authority, an independent agency within the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that oversees the FirstNet network, which is specifically dedicated to US emergency responders and the public safety community. The agency traces its origins to the communications troubles first responders encountered during their reactions to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City.
In 2017, AT&T won the contract to build out FirstNet’s 20MHz of spectrum in the 700MHz band (Band 14). To do that, AT&T is installing FirstNet 700MHz transmitters on its towers and on the towers of some supporting partner carriers. Both FirstNet customers and AT&T’s commercial customers have access to FirstNet’s spectrum as well as AT&T’s other spectrum bands, though FirstNet customers receive priority access – meaning, they get first dibs on any available network capacity in an emergency. As AT&T passes FirstNet buildout goals, it receives portions of Congress’ $6.5 billion FirstNet allotment.
“The Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network is just that: it is America’s only nationwide, interoperable network that is specifically designed for public safety,” Parkinson explained.
AT&T is now headed into the final year of its initial five-year FirstNet commitment. The company currently covers 95% of the territory it agreed to cover in that five-year stretch, blanketing 2.71 million square miles of territory across the US. (That’s the only coverage metric FirstNet provides publicly; it doesn’t disclose the number of cell towers it’s using or the number of people it covers.)
Nonetheless, today FirstNet counts more than 3 million connections across more than 19,000 public safety agencies. Those FirstNet users have access to more than 300 supported devices and close to 200 applications and services in the FirstNet “app catalog.”
Much of that connectivity today is on 4G LTE. But that’s not where it will stay. “It’ll evolve into a 5G ecosystem. And, in time, into a 6G ecosystem, and beyond. We’ll see additional coverage expansion. We’ll see integration of different tools and technologies and assets into the network. And this provides that unique apparatus that is FirstNet,” Parkinson said.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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