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

Of course, we do not know if FirstNet will address these and other features that are important to the public-safety and critical-infrastructure sectors. Most expect the RFP to outline these requirements to some extent, but exactly how FirstNet addresses these key elements will not be known until a partner is chosen in a year or more and deployments are scheduled.

In the meantime, these offerings from AT&T and Verizon should provide important insights to all involved. For instance, the carriers should learn more about public-safety and critical-infrastructure usage patterns. In addition, a lot will be learned about which traffic these entities value most.

Experience also could be gained about the effectiveness and difficulty of utilizing LTE prioritization functionality, which has long been in the standard but has seen limited real-world usage. It will also be interesting to see how the different capacity offerings—AT&T  does not propose a data cap, while Verizon will prioritize only 2 MB/s worth of traffic from a device—resonate with users and impact the carriers’ bottom lines.

Finally, these offerings may help establish what public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities are willing to pay for prioritization.

Almost from the moment that FirstNet was created, conventional wisdom has said that public safety would be willing to pay no more than $5 or $10 per month more per device for preemptive priority service over a FirstNet system utilizing dedicated public-safety spectrum. But the AT&T public-safety offering will cost $15 per month more per device, even though it does not provide preemptive access. If public safety is willing to pay such a premium, it becomes much easier to envision a sustainable business for FirstNet.

Some industry observers have asserted that the fact that AT&T and Verizon have committed to providing these prioritization services means they would rather challenge FirstNet instead of being part of a bidding team proposing to partner with FirstNet. That may be the case, but I don’t think the offerings should be perceived as actions that close any doors to partner with FirstNet.

For carriers, such prioritization offerings could prove to be invaluable in providing real-world operational knowledge about the challenges associated with FirstNet. This information should be helpful to the carriers, whether they ultimately decide to compete with FirstNet, partner with FirstNet or negotiate a roaming arrangement with FirstNet.

At the same time, public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities should be able to use the new prioritization offerings as an opportunity to experiment with broadband applications. Then, when the time comes to make a decision to subscribe to FirstNet, there will be a real-world service that can be used as a comparison point.