pdvWireless announces bid for FirstNet, belief that FCC will release NOI on 900 MHz broadband proposal

With this in mind, pdvWireless plans to provide narrowband and wideband solutions—addressing both dispatch and machine-to-machine (M2M)/Internet of Things (IoT) markets—until its broadband solution is approved, Pescatore said.

O’Brien said that that the number of incumbents that need to be rebanded at 900 MHz is much less than initially thought—60 licensees compared to the 400 potential licensees—and that pdvWireless officials are confident that all concerns about the broadband proposal expressed by 900 MHz incumbents can be resolved.

If pdvWireless can be successful in its bid for FirstNet and its 900 MHz broadband plans, the potential efficiencies that could be gained by deploying both networks simultaneously are significant, O’Brien said.

“I think there are terrific synergies,” O’Brien said. “FirstNet, when it gets started, will have the task of building nationwide priority access for public safety of all types. If we are to be successful at what we’re proposing, we have somewhat the same task. It’s different spectrum—theirs is 700 MHz and ours is 900 MHz—but we have a similar objective of trying to provide virtually the same kind of services—same technology, same everything else—for critical infrastructure, which is sort of the next rung down on the priority ladder [for FirstNet].

With this in mind, pdvWireless considers the FirstNet initiative to be “very complementary” to the pdvWireless proposal to establish broadband service targeted toward critical-infrastructure customers in the 900 MHz band, O’Brien said. Participating in both deployments simultaneously would be beneficial to the company, he said.

“You spent less on capex, you spend less on opex, and the customer bases are very complementary,” O’Brien said. “Each has occasion to be connected on a network with the other, and each is possibly a source of demand for excess capability, so we think they are synergistic.

“People are always using synergy as the justification for anything they want to do, but I think—in this case—it’s fair.”

Even if pdvWireless is not selected as the FirstNet contractor, the process associated with assembling a consortium and preparing the bid has provided the company with intangible benefits as it pursues the 900 MHz proposal, Pescatore said.

“We’re thinking that our network is not that different from the type of requirements that public safety would have,” Pescatore said. “Independent of that, we take a chunk of what we’re doing and redeploy it in our base business, and we see a lot of synergy there, as well.”

O’Brien echoed this sentiment.

“We know more about the potential of LTE to meet the needs of the customers we’re looking at in critical infrastructure than we ever would have known, if we hadn’t gone into this consortium,” O’Brien said.