Gifts of clarity would be huge for critical communications in 2015
911 community—The FCC deserves a lot of credit for moving quickly on key 911 issues regarding reliability and setting the table for new wireless location-accuracy rules that address emergency calls made from cell phones from inside a building. But continued focus is needed in this area—probably with help from Congress—to ensure that there is a clear path that can be followed to ensure that all public-safety answering points (PSAPs) can migrate to next-generation 911, so we don’t have vast differences in emergency-calling functionality in different locations throughout the nation.
FirstNet—To provide the kind of clarity that public safety wants, FirstNet needs to take the considerable input it has received from numerous sources and begin making fundamental policy decisions. FirstNet has been careful not to show favoritism to particular vendors or even network/business concepts, but 2015 needs to be the year when the organization begins to share its vision about what this much-anticipated broadband system will look like and how it plans to make it a reality.
To make this happen, it would help if FirstNet had some key players in place, namely: A permanent executive director and a permanent Chief Technical Officer (The number of days with both in place after 27 months of existence? Zero); a bunch of LTE engineers in the Boulder, Colo., area to fill the technical needs of both FirstNet and PSCR; and a champion on Capitol Hill to replace the retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
For the U.S. citizens—At least some level of coordination between all of the exciting critical-communications broadband initiatives.
All of these worthwhile broadband efforts—FirstNet, next-gen 911, smart grid, telemedicine, intelligent transportation, E-Rate for school and libraries, or the effort to make broadband links the universal-service level of connectivity, instead of copper wires—require reliable high-speed backhaul, often in area where fiber deployments would not have been considered previously. When these backhaul links are created, it is important that a mechanism exists to ensure that enough capacity is deployed to address all of these needs, so taxpayers/customers are not asked to pay for essentially the same link to be rebuilt for each initiative separately.
Editor’s note: Because of the holidays, no UC Today newsletter will be deployed on Thursday, Dec. 25, or on Thursday, Jan. 1.