Utilities remain a potentially ideal broadband partner to public safety, FirstNet

Once upon a time, the answer was limited to the three core public-safety sectors—fire, EMS and law enforcement—but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a broader definition of first responders. Whether critical-infrastructure entities such as utilities should be considered first responders has been a hot topic of debate.

The final answer is not just a trivial exercise. First responders will be given priority access to the FirstNet system, while other users—for instance, commercial users on the network in a sharing arrangement designed to generate revenue—will be deemed secondary users and could be knocked off the network in a given cell sector, if first responders need all the capacity in the location in the wake of an emergency.

For utilities, being secondary users that can be pre-empted during emergencies almost certainly would nix any FirstNet partnership talks—after all, it makes no sense to significant resources in a network that may not be available when it is needed most.

But UTC officials and other utilities representatives have noted that utilities do not necessarily need all of their applications running at all times. If public safety needs additional bandwidth capacity during an emergency, things like automated meter reading and many smart-grid conveniences can be turned off. What utilities cannot afford is to have a few key core applications—low-bandwidth applications that let utilities know whether their network is running properly—be subject to network preemption. These applications must be able to run at all times.

However, given utilities’ flexibility to throttle down their bandwidth needs during times of public-safety emergencies, there conceptually should be a sharing scheme that works for both FirstNet and utilities. Getting the proper players to the table to negotiate such an arrangement promises to be challenging, but the payoff would be well worth the effort: a more robust broadband network that could address communications needs to support both public-safety interoperability and smart-grid initiatives.