NTIA still undecided about fate of public-safety LTE projects funded with BTOP money

In the San Francisco Bay area, the public-safety BTOP grant was awarded to Motorola Solutions—the lone BTOP grantee that was a vendor, instead of a government entity. However, the project was not started, because the Bay Area Regional Interoperable Communications Systems Authority (BayRICS) was unable to negotiate a spectrum-lease agreement with FirstNet.

Whether the Bay-area BTOP project is still “active” may be debatable, but the barriers that existed previously still exist today, so it is difficult to imagine a scenario that would allow the planned public-safety LTE deployment to be restarted, according to BAYRICS General Manager Barry Fraser.

“We’re certainly aware of this legislation, we’re looking into it and we have preserved a lot of the pre-planning and the assets from the grant—even more than two years [since the Bay-area project was halted], we could go back and start something quickly,” Fraser said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“But the bottom line is that I haven’t heard anything from NTIA or FirstNet that they have any interest in reviving our project. Until I hear from them, I’m just not going to put a lot of effort into it.”

Perhaps the most intriguing public-safety BTOP project that could be eligible for the five-year extension is in the state of Mississippi. When NTIA froze the public-safety BTOP projects in the spring of 2012 after Congress passed the legislation creating FirstNet, the state’s public-safety LTE network was just “weeks away” from completion, according to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). Later, Mississippi was not able to reach a spectrum-lease agreement with FirstNet, and the project was halted.

Whether the Mississippi public-safety LTE project is considered “active” must be determined before the potential five-year BTOP extension could be considered, according to most sources. In addition, the state of Mississippi also would need to convince FirstNet to grant it a spectrum lease to make the project relevant.

But reaching this stage would require Mississippi to alter drastically its current relationship with FirstNet. At the moment, Mississippi is the only state or territory that has not completed its initial state-consultation meeting with FirstNet. In fact, the state of Mississippi also was the only state that chose not to apply for federal grants under the State and Local Implementation Grant Program (SLIGP) that was established to pay for much of the planning work in a state associated with the FirstNet deployment.

No state-consultation meeting has been scheduled with the state of Mississippi, but FirstNet officials have been in conversations with officials from the state about conducting a consultation meeting, according to a FirstNet spokesman.

Another public-safety LTE early-builder initiative in the United States is being pursued in Harris County, Texas. However, that project is not using BTOP grants, so it is not impacted by the recent action by Congress. In Harris County, a recent decision was made to have local taxpayers fund the expansion of the network.