Commercial priority-service offerings promise to be eye-opening to carriers, public safety, critical infrastructure

Certainly the AT&T and Verizon offerings provide new choices that many industry observers thought would never come from commercial providers, which traditionally have sold only “best effort” wireless services with no guarantee of quality of service (not including expensive dedicated-network services, of course). Now, any enterprise can specify its most important traffic and pay extra to ensure that those packets are prioritized on LTE networks.

Such offerings will fulfill the needs of many enterprises, which want to make sure that key communications links work during times when network capacity is stressed, such as during an emergency or a major planned event.

But will these prioritization services meet all the communications needs for public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities? In other words, will they make the FirstNet system irrelevant, even before the request for proposal (RFP) for much-anticipated public-safety broadband is issued next month?

I don’t think so, if FirstNet delivers on the many promises that have been made over the years. While the Verizon and AT&T offerings represent options that have not been available in the past, they do fall short in several areas that many believe FirstNet should address, including:

Preemptive network access—The priority access promised by AT&T means that a qualified user moves to the front of line when accessing the network, and that should suffice in most circumstances. However, if a priority user tries to access a cell sector that already is being used to its maximum capacity, there is a chance that the user could remain in line and not be able to access the network.

Public-safety officials want preemptive access, which involves throttling some existing users’ bandwidth—or knocking some users off of the system—to make room on the network for the new qualified user. LTE technology can support this functionality, even though a recent study indicates that it should not be necessary in most cases.

Hardening—While AT&T and Verizon promise to prioritize traffic on their systems, that promise only is as good as the networks used for transmission. At the moment, the offerings are designed to use the carriers’ existing commercial networks. If severe weather or a power outage cause the relevant commercial network to go down all the prioritization in the world will not help communications.

Commercial wireless networks have become much more reliable in recent years, but most public-safety officials still contend that they do not meet the standards for mission-critical communications.

Coverage—To make their offers a reality, AT&T and Verizon are leveraging prioritization capabilities found in LTE. However, there are still areas of the country that are not covered by LTE, not to mention areas that do not have wireless service of any kind.