Verizon preemption service ‘available’ to public-safety customers but not necessarily ‘enabled’

With preemptive access, public-safety users are guaranteed access to the cell sector and to the desired amount of bandwidth—even if the cell sector is saturated with commercial traffic and a commercial customer would have to be removed from the cell sector to make room for the public-safety user, which is known as “ruthless preemption.”

Preemption differs from priority service—something both Verizon and AT&T previously offered to public-safety users as a commercial offering—in that it guarantees access to the cell sector, even if it is saturated with traffic. With priority access, the user is moved to the front of the queue to get service; however, if the cell sector is saturated with traffic, a priority user could remain without communications while waiting for capacity within the cell sector to become available.

Ruthless preemption automatically is provided to all FirstNet subscribers in the “primary” public-safety category—law enforcement, fire, EMS, 911 and emergency-management personnel. FirstNet subscribers in the “extended primary” public-safety category—an undefined grouping at the moment, but one that is expected to include at least some personnel in the utility, transportation, government, hospital and other critical-infrastructure sectors—will be given priority access but not preemption on an automatic basis.

However, “extended primary” FirstNet subscribers could be elevated to receive preemptive access in certain cases where the user is performing a primary public-safety role during a response, according to AT&T.

Consumer or commercial users making calls to 911—typically the initial step in an emergency response—will not be subject to having their communications interrupted as part of preemptive access, according to the announcement from FirstNet and AT&T.

But the need for priority and preemptive access is expected to be extremely rare on the Verizon and AT&T networks, according to industry analysts and engineers. Given the flexibility of LTE networks and the massive capacity of the AT&T or Verizon networks, a consumer or commercial customer would have little realistic chance of losing the ability to communicate entirely.

If public safety has a need for a large amount of bandwidth within a given cell sector, that normally could be accommodated by moving consumer/commercial users to another spectrum band or lowering their data speeds, as opposed to removing them from the network entirely.