Utilities interested in partnering with FirstNet, even if 900 MHz LTE initiative is successful

FirstNet board member Charles Dowd—a deputy chief for the New York Police Department (NYPD) and another panelist during the IWCE partnership session—said that the legislation that created FirstNet two years allows for public-private agreements with utilities and other potential partners. FirstNet officials are considering “very creative, thoughtful” partnership opportunities but have not made any decisions to date.

“I wouldn’t exclude any possibility at this point,” Dowd said.

Determining priority and preemption policies is not just something that FirstNet needs to clarify for potential partners like utilities, it also needs to be done in a manner to ensure that different types of public-safety agencies—law enforcement, fire and EMS entities—will have be able to access bandwidth capacity when they need it, according to Jim Bugel, AT&T’s vice president of public-safety solutions. FirstNet officials have stated that local control will be a fundamental tenet of network operations, but determining exactly how priority and preemption will work during a given incident is a significant task.

“That’s a boatload of work from the user-interface side,” Bugel said during the IWCE session. “It would be safe to say that, if an LTE network appeared for public safety nationwide, the roadblock right now would be, ‘What are those user-governance [policies]?’

“How does [Dowd] manage his network? How is that done, and how does that maintain interoperability across the country?”