Priority 1: Public safety

To determine how the nationwide network should be architected, FirstNet plans to focus its efforts in the near future on the needs of first-response agencies at the state and local levels, according to Craig Farrill, a FirstNet board member who is serving as acting general manager for the organization until a full-time general manager is hired. "I think that's our key milestone right now," Farrill said during an interview with Urgent Communications. "Job 1 is focused on our requirements and state consultations and continuing to work on the network architecture and modifying it as we hear the input. But really, our single focus right now is state consultation."

During the February meeting, Farrill indicated that he would like to unveil technical, business and operational plans for the nationwide network during the FirstNet board's next meeting in April. But Farrill emphasized during the interview that he only wants to do that if the public-safety community has had a chance to provide appropriate input.

"April is the earliest we could do that," Farrill said. "If we're still moving forward, I think that needs to wait until we have all the input. We want to get it all. … It's a lot of people to see and a lot of places to go. But, if we need to spend additional time, all that additional time will be worth it to get a better sense of everyone's needs and be sure that we've heard all the voices and talked to all our prospective state teams that are working with us."

What will the network look like?

One of the fears expressed initially by some public-safety representatives was that the many FirstNet board members with commercial backgrounds — Farrill being one of them — might not grasp the resiliency and reliability needs of public-safety communications, where failure is not an option, even under the worst of circumstances. Whether such fears were warranted is debatable, but several FirstNet board members have noted that public safety's ability to operate during and after Superstorm Sandy was an eye-opening experience, particularly as commercial power and telecommunications systems failed. Ensuring that first responders can communicate during such trying circumstances is a driving force behind the FirstNet vision.

"Our goal really is to create this resiliency in the network, so it is resilient to failures, it is resilient to natural disasters, it is resilient to terrorist attacks, and it's secure and protected in its operation, meaning that it will have diversity in its radio dimensions and diversity in its switching dimensions," Farrill said during the FirstNet meeting in February.

"In other words, it has to be a 'you bet your life on it' network — a network that a person walks into a burning building depending on; a network that a person walks into a building with guns drawn — and people drawing guns back at them — that they can depend on. And, it needs to be something that can be relied on in the worst of disasters."

Other lofty goals for the network include covering "every square meter" of the United States and providing control at the local level when first-responder agencies respond during an emergency, Ginn said.

"The concept here is national engineering, construction and operation for interoperability reasons, for security reasons and for reliability reasons, and yet have local public-service entities controlling their own destiny, in terms of the applications that they use and the grade of service that they demand," he said.

To achieve this level of coverage and reliability, Farrill has proposed a "3-in-1" architecture that leverages multiple terrestrial networks, multiple satellite systems (see sidebar below), and systems that can be deployed quickly in a disaster area, if infrastructure supporting the first two networks is destroyed or unavailable. Farrill said that he unveiled the concept during the initial FirstNet meeting last September to help spark discussion in the first-responder community and industry.

"We thought a higher level of reliability could be achieved by a more diverse approach. This approach is used heavily by [the U.S. Department of Defense]," Farrill said. "So, our purpose with the presentation was to really stir a discussion in the industry and public-safety community at large, allowing us to hear back from the industry on how well [that aligns] with the public-safety requirements that have been so well developed over the years."