Journey to FirstNet a story of remarkable persistence, refusal to succumb to doubters
“After the law passed, someone said to me, ‘I don’t know if you guys know this, but what you just did was impossible,’” FirstNet Vice Chairman Jeff Johnson said during the special FirstNet board meeting on March 28. “I will say, in retrospect, if we had known how impossible it was, we wouldn’t have tried it.
“I think the only thing we had going for us was a bunch of hard-headed public-safety people who don’t take ‘No’ for an answer very well … We don’t take ‘No’ very well, and we don’t quit very easy. And, when public safety and the purpose of public safety [are at stake], you can’t stop. But I reflect that it really was impossible—we just didn’t know it.”
Maybe it is an example where ignorance is bliss. Or maybe it is simply a case where a good idea emerges to the surface. As my good friend Andrew Seybold—a tireless advocate for public safety, particularly when technical explanations were needed on Capitol Hill—has said and written on many occasions about supporting public-safety broadband, “It’s the right thing to do.”
And now it appears that the elusive FirstNet vision will be done—in a fashion that public safety would have had difficulty imagining when the FirstNet legislation was passed in 2012.
“You know, Congress gave us 20 MHz and $7 billion,” FirstNet board member Kevin McGinnis said during an IWCE 2017 on March 30. “As of our signing today, we’ve upped that—in just one day—to having those opt-in states having earlier access, on Day 1, to all bands in AT&T’s network while the FirstNet network in Band 14 is built out with priority, with preemption access. We had no idea that we were going to be able to jump start that fast.
“And, with that 20 MHz and $7 billion, we just turned that into $228.5 billion—based on the valuation of AT&T’s network, the money they’re going to put into the process and the $6.5 billion that we have—and 170 MHz—20 of ours, 150 MHz of theirs—on Day 1. Not a bad start.”
No kidding.
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of work remaining—building a nationwide network is no easy task, even with a proven operator like AT&T on public safety’s side. But all of the pieces appear to be in place, thanks to contributions from more people than can possibly be listed in this column.
Yes, questions about issues such as pricing, “opt-out” decisions and local-control operations still have to be answered. But no one is associating the word “never” as a response to such inquiries, because it is clear that they can be addressed. It’s a nice change of pace, after a decade of doubts.
Now, first responders will have dedicated, public-safety-grade broadband access that can be leveraged to run applications that could not be fathomed just a few short years ago. It’s remarkable, because this FirstNet system should not exist, given the number of the times conventional wisdom said it would “never” happen.
But it will happen. Public safety, welcome to a new version of Neverland.