New Hampshire issues RFP for public-safety LTE system, but official says no opt-out decision has been made

Stevens described that the September 2017 completion date in the RFP as “idealistic” and that the schedule could be changed.

“We have to put parameters on it, but I would certainly suggest that those dates would move from time to time, based on whatever the outcomes may be,” Stevens said. “We really don’t have any idea in regards to deployment, at this point in time. We’ll see what happens, if in fact we get any proposals in return. Then, we’ll begin discussing from there.”

Indeed, executing the RFP would require the state of New Hampshire to clear some notable hurdles to meet the aggressive proposed timeline.

If the RFP process is designed to provide a comparison perspective to FirstNet’s plan for the state, then New Hampshire officials likely would have to wait until mid-2017 to see the FirstNet plan for the state.

In the RFP, the state of New Hampshire acknowledges that it may choose not to sign a contract when the bid process is completed—a scenario that Stevens presented as a distinct possibility.

“I fully expect that we will remain committed to our initial agenda with FirstNet,” he said. “We just have to be able to be in a situation to understand all of our options.”

Perhaps most important, the RFP’s proposed timetable does not account for the fact that the state of New Hampshire does not have a spectrum-lease agreement with FirstNet to utilize the 20 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band.

“No one’s going to deploy anything until those spectrum rights are secured,” said one industry source.

FirstNet has approved spectrum-lease agreements in the past, but each of those deals took several months to complete, despite the fact that the FirstNet board at the time publicly cited its desire to have early-builder networks deployed, so FirstNet could learn from real-world uses of public-safety LTE. In contrast, the New Hampshire project does not provide an early-builder advantage, and FirstNet board members may not be as supportive of the New Hampshire initiative as they were for some of the early-builder deployments.

Moreover, FirstNet has established a procedure that states and territories should follow, if their governors choose the opt-out alternative that is allowed by law. That lengthy process does not call for a spectrum-lease agreement to be negotiated until the final stage.