Rivada Mercury unveils key partners of team pursuing FirstNet contract

Martinez said that Harris is the “public-safety face of Rivada Mercury” with primary responsibility in the following areas: customer acquisition, customer care and the development of open ecosystems for devices and applications.

“It is FirstNet’s intent—and we will implement accordingly—to ensure that these are open markets,” Martinez said. “Any and all vendors will be encouraged to bring their devices and applications to the table, as well as their related services.”

In addition, Rivada Mercury will leverage the Harris public-safety experience as it seeks to optimize the reliability of the first-responder broadband system, Martinez said.

“There are areas in which Harris is playing an engineering-support role,” he said. “We don’t have primary responsibility for construction, but we are playing an advisory role as it relates to mission-critical reliability, sustainability and public-safety grade.”

Financing the robust nature of Rivada Mercury’s proposed system is the Rivada Network business model of leveraging its Dynamic Spectrum Arbitrage (DSA) technology to monetize network capacity that is not used by public safety by selling it to the highest secondary-use bidder in an open marketplace.

“At the end of the day, this business will not be successful, if it isn’t financially sustainable,” Martinez said. “I think Rivada Networks brings two very important things to the table. One is a technology that allows for dynamic sharing of spectrum between the primary use of public safety and the secondary use on a commercial basis. And, quite frankly, without the revenue that you get from the secondary use of the spectrum, you can’t achieve sustainability.”

Ganley said that the Rivada Mercury proposal has “very strong backing from multiple household names from Wall Street,” although those financial supporters are not being disclosed at this time. In addition, the DSA concept is being supported by “some very large exchange partners, so this is going to be a commodity that’s going to be traded on exchanges around the world.”

Rivada Networks plans to participate in public-safety LTE and wholesale-broadband procurements throughout the world, but the Rivada Mercury team is unique to the U.S. initiative to build and maintain a nationwide public-safety broadband network, Ganley said.

“You may see some of the same team members, but it’s not exactly a cookie cutter,” Ganley said. “What is common and consistent in what you will see anywhere that Rivada Network is involved in taking one of these projects on is that the commoditization of bandwidth in the open-access marketplace is really central to the economics of all of them.”