Adams County equips first public-safety vehicle with Band 14 LTE

In addition to waiting until the coverage was close to complete, a technical challenge encountered by ADCOM911 was the fact that few Band 14 SIM cards were available for use, according to Mike Brunswig, ADCOM911’s assistant director of administration.

“We had to develop a nationwide SIM card profile that took a lot of time and effort, because there were a lot of technical aspects to that and challenges to overcome,” Brunswig said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

After spending months with FirstNet to develop a SIM-card profile, the process of securing SIM cards in the future should be much easier for ADCOM911 and other public-safety entities operating on the FirstNet system, Newman said.

“Now, the SIM-card manufacturers have the information they need to start producing those in bulk,” Newman said. “The reason that’s good is that any other LTE project … when they’re ready to order a large number of SIM cards, that template is already built and the profile is already done. So, they can just call up the vendor and say, ‘We need a hundred, 500 or whatever the quantity may be.”

After the beginning of 2015, ADCOM911 expects LTE equipment to be deployed in the 500 vehicles used by its public-safety-agency partners quickly, Newman said.

“The expectation is that, by April of next year, the vast majority of our entire fleet should be up and running on our system,” he said. “Really, the limitation is how quickly they can dedicate the time necessary to get the equipment installed.”