LA-RICS board delays consideration of Motorola Solutions LTE contract
Last August, Mallon and other LA-RICS officials made a presentation to the FirstNet board to outline the long-term communications plan for LA-RICS that includes the use of both P25 LMR and LTE technologies.
Mallon told the FirstNet board that the LTE project is critical for public-safety communications, because Los Angeles public-safety entities are required to vacate their LMR operations from the T-Band spectrum (470-512 MHz) by 2021, and there is not enough spectrum available in other bands to simply migrate existing narrowband systems. Instead, LA-RICS hopes to offload enough non-mission-critical voice traffic to the LTE system to allow mission-critical voice communications to be carried over narrowband public-safety channels in the UHF and 700 MHz bands.
LA-RICS signed a contract with Motorola Solutions to build the P25 network at a cost that could total $149.6 million, if all phases of the plan are deployed. LA-RICS issued an RFP for the LTE network in August and began contract negotiations with Motorola Solutions in December for the project.