Sound Off with Scott Tschetter of Eastern Communications

Has the advent of FirstNet and its plans for a nationwide, first-responder broadband network impacted your business?

“There are a lot of question marks about what’s going to happen with FirstNet. I think everyone’s coming to the realization that it’s going to be awhile before there’s a funding model and a deployment of a broadband network that’s going to replace traditional land mobile radio. I think people are coming to the realization that that’s many years off. It’s a long-term process, and there’s a lot of question marks, so people are bringing their current systems up to date while they wait to see what’s happens with [FirstNet].”

In the meantime, are you training staff members to be prepared for LTE?

“We’re definitely doing a couple of key things, and not just because of FirstNet; our industry has been moving to IP-based networks for at least the last 6 or 7 years. Our engineers and our top systems technicians … maybe 15 years ago, the typical profile for that person would be anyone who had a ham-radio license and was really strong on the RF—that was their skill set.

“Today, we still need that, because we’re still in a very specialized marketplace—not many college programs have classes that directly relate to radio propagation in a land-mobile-radio environment. But the new things have come on the IP side. Our guys now have certifications from Cisco. We’re making a significant investment every year to train our guys on MPLS, routing, Cisco-based security and IP-based networks, because a modern-day radio system is really an IP network that’s carrying radio as the data.

“It’s not enough to just be an expert in RF. Now, if you’re going to help implement, design or maintain a modern-day communications system, you’ve got to have significant IP skills. And it’s not just the IP side … Most of the servers running these infrastructures are Linux- or Unix-based, and that’s a specialized skill set for our industry.

“And a lot of our customers are changing. It used to be that there was always a radio shop that ran the radio system. But now, for a lot of our customers, the organization responsible for running the communications system is the IT department, so our technical people have to have skill sets in the IT world, as well as the RF world.

“LTE is an IP-based protocol. So, in essence, we’ve been preparing for LTE for the last seven years, just by the nature of where our industry was headed anyway.”