A challenging equation

But pursuing such partnerships is not a straightforward choice. Existing law dictates that only public-safety entities can access the 10 MHz of broadband spectrum licensed to the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), according to most legal interpretations. In addition, partnering only would be an option if Congress reallocates the 10 MHz D Block to public safety instead of auctioning it, according to mobile wireless consultant Andrew Seybold, who advocated reallocation based on recent tests he conducted on the San Francisco Bay Area network.

“Even close to the cell center (0.5 miles), the amount of video and data that can be transmitted and received on a 10-MHz LTE network ?(5×5 MHz) network is not sufficient for the needs of public safety even during normal incidents that occur on a daily basis,” Seybold said in a preliminary report to Congress. “Increasing the available spectrum to 20 MHz (10×10 MHz) would more than double the amount of video and data that can be used in both the uplink and downlink.”

Without the D Block, public safety frequently would struggle to have enough capacity to address its own broadband needs. Indeed, utilizing just the current 10 MHz of 700 MHz broadband spectrum would leave public safety “severely limited” in using wireless broadband in a given cell sector when mid-sized incidents occur (see sidebar) — something that happens daily in metro areas and weekly in suburban locations, according to Seybold.

However, when an emergency response is not in progress, a public-safety-only LTE network would be underutilized most of the time. So, significant broadband capacity that could be used by other entities would be wasted if only traditional public-safety entities were allowed access. With this in mind, many have advocated that public safety share the network with critical-infrastructure partners, with the idea that public safety’s capacity needs would take priority during times of emergencies.

Such arrangements are possible with LTE, a standard that includes multiple layers of prioritization protocols that can be used to allocate bandwidth dynamically to specific users and applications — even at the cell-sector level — depending on the usage circumstances.

“One of the things [LTE] technology allows is a quality-of-service scheme that allows you to set different application priorities, user priorities, different preemption levels, [and guaranteed] minimum or maximum bandwidth levels that allow everybody to function on the same network,” said Mark Madden, Alcatel-Lucent’s regional vice president for utility markets. “It’s entirely feasible and practical to do, from a technical perspective.”

Despite claims from the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC) that current law gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the authority to allow non-public-safety entities access to the PSST broadband spectrum, most believe that the FCC would seek clarification from Congress before taking such a step. Various legislative proposals would give public safety the freedom necessary to pursue such partnerships.

“You award [public safety] the D Block with the flexibility that, if public safety decides to work with partners such as utilities, they have the right to do that,” Seybold said during an interview. “That has to be done when the bill is passed.”

Sharing options

Even if flexibility is granted, there is the significant question of whether public safety can reach an agreement with potential partners on a sharing arrangement that meets the needs of all participants in the deal.

On the surface, the easiest potential deals should be with other non-public-safety local government entities — for instance, inspection organizations, sanitation workers and parks departments. After all, these groups often answer to the same elected officials that control public-safety budgets, so establishing a priority scheme should not be as difficult as it would with an outside entity.

Of course, one of the key issues for public-safety 700 MHz LTE networks is financing, both for the buildout of the network and for ongoing operations and maintenance. Absent federal funding to pay for virtually everything — a notion that is part of some proposed legislation, but one that may be opposed by a significant number of lawmakers, particularly in the House — these local government entities will be hard-pressed to find money to help pay for a new network, as most are contemplating massive layoffs across multiple agencies to address existing budget shortfalls.

Transportation entities are a potentially valuable partner, as that sector migrates toward a new generation of intelligent transportation technologies that can leverage wireless connectivity in a manner that is designed to improve both the safety and efficiency of myriad transit modes.

From traffic-light synchronization to more sophisticated applications that help improve visibility of traffic patterns and arrival times of transit vehicles, there are many transportation applications that could benefit from broadband wireless connectivity. In addition, such transportation entities often are crucial partners during emergency situations, as they help aid the rerouting of traffic — or the evacuation of an area — when an incident occurs.

Some have proposed allowing consumers to access unused capacity on public-safety LTE networks, but this idea has been dismissed, for the most part. Not only could the demands of consumers potentially infringe on first-responders’ access to the network, but most policymakers do not want a government-funded network to compete with private broadband providers that pay taxes. A potential exception is in the most rural areas, where capacity should not be an issue and consumers do not have commercial options.

Perhaps the most intriguing partners are distribution utilities, such as gas and electric providers, which offer several potential synergies with the first-responder community, including significant rights of way, backhaul options, a sizeable user base, an ongoing funding source and a need to move to next-generation technology as part of the smart-grid initiative. Most significantly, utilities and public safety approach the need for network reliability in a similar manner.

“The general requirements for utilities and public safety are essentially the same — the network has to stay up, no matter what,” Madden said. “They build networks the same way. A utility builds continuous backup power onto their sites. They don’t rely on eight hours of battery or 24 hours of battery. They will put generation on site and fill the generators, as well as test them periodically.

“It’s a costly way to build a network. That’s why you don’t see a lot of carriers building that way — their level of service requirement isn’t five 9s in a hurricane, where it is for the utilities and for public safety.”

Some see the utility sector’s need for reliability as a double-edged sword. While the shared desire for a hardened, redundant network meshes well with public safety’s reliability demands, it is driven by a reality that could prove inconvenient — utilities have mission-critical applications that must function at all times. As a result, utilities cannot afford to have these key applications preempted, regardless of the emergency circumstances.

A growing number of public-safety officials have expressed a willingness to share proposed 700 MHz LTE networks, but many have said that they are willing to do that only if non-public-safety entities are treated as secondary users on the network and are subject to being bumped off the network during an emergency. For utilities, such preemption would not be acceptable, according to Douglas Jarrett, a telecommunications attorney with Keller & Heckman.

Hurdles to sharing

“You’re putting people with significant societal obligations that are not public-safety agencies in a quandary,” Jarrett said, noting that his interpretation of existing legislation would make utilities secondary users. “It gives pause to utilities, who say, ‘Is this worth it to us?'”

Madden said that he believes agreements between public-safety agencies and utilities can be structured to meet the needs of both groups. Like Jarrett, Madden believes that the possibility of complete preemption at any time would not be a viable alternative for utilities. However, utilities do not always need the 3 to 5 Mbps they want during “normal” times, so their data rates could be reduced during times of emergencies to give first responders access to additional throughput, he said.

During such scenarios, utilities’ most critical functions are monitored by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that require so little bandwidth — “9600 baud stuff” — that public-safety broadband performance should not be negatively impacted by its guaranteed throughput.

“When it comes down to critical functions … utilities’ bandwidth requirements are actually fairly low,” he said. “By fairly low, I mean that they have a need for a certain amount of bandwidth at any given time that they can squeeze down on request or on demand.”

While LTE can support such dynamic throughput allocations, establishing rules and procedures that address when and how such network changes should be implemented could be challenging, Madden said.

“The big issue is going to be around governance, because that’s untested territory,” he said.

Madden and Seybold both emphasized the fact that shared users may have their bandwidth decreased during an emergency at the location of an incident, but that often will impact only a cell sector or two, not the entire network.

“Whenever we think about emergencies, everybody tends to stop and think about the macro network — the whole network,” Madden said. “Everyone is worried that, if there’s a public-safety emergency, suddenly everybody’s going to get preempted off the whole network. That’s really not true.

“Public-safety things and utility things tend to be in a very localized geography, so you can manage that within any given sector.”

Motorola’s Keith agreed.

Why partnerships can work

“When you spread the bandwidth across a city … and look at it systemically, there’s a whole bunch of bandwidth out there where the incident isn’t happening, where other agencies definitely could benefit from bandwidth that’s not perfectly balanced out there,” he said.

Keith added that LTE technology is designed to provide dynamic bandwidth allocation. But while rules and policies can be devised to make most decisions automatically, he questions whether that is a sustainable model when large incidents occur.

“There’s a few rules you can live by, but the technology is not enough,” he said. “So, the way we’re looking at this is the same way we’ve been looking at it for 80 years — put it in the hands of a central dispatcher who can identify with people talking and moving data.

“It comes down to people — I don’t know how else to do it. There’s no such thing as an algorithm or a technology or a priority [for every possible scenario].”

If this hurdle can be cleared, the potential benefits of public safety sharing its broadband LTE network with other entities are very intriguing, Keith said. Not only can the first-responder community be more interoperable with critical-infrastructure entities — the importance of which has been underscored during the Gulf Coast oil spill and Japan’s nuclear-reactor scare — but the various partners can pool resources to build and maintain more sites, creating a more robust, more reliable network together than any one of the sectors could hope to construct on their own.

“The civil-asset aspects of utilities is even more interesting to me,” Keith said. “What we’re finding out is that the LTE-equipment percentage of a deal may range anywhere from 20% to 30% maximum. The rest of it is civils and installs.

“Utilities have an enormous real-estate footprint — poles, sites, places where they have facilities built out — where public safety could do some sharing and say, ‘Look, you have different substations, switching yards and fiber backhaul. I’d like to plant my sites there to avoid having to lease or purchase those sites long term from tower vendors that would charge several thousand dollars per month. There’s a big sharing alternative here that would allow both groups to cut their costs.”

Indeed, the ability for potential public-safety partners to save on backhaul costs and the LTE core represent notable cost-saving opportunities that could be available through sharing. In addition, most industry sources believe it could be some time before potential partners in the transportation or utility sectors would have an opportunity to secure the spectrum and funding needed to build their own broadband networks.

Meanwhile, for public safety, most Capitol Hill opponents to legislation that would reallocate the D Block to public safety and provide funding for LTE networks are expected to come from the House, where fiscal conservatives are focused on trying to reduce the massive federal deficit and curbing government spending.

From this perspective, starting a program that would require at least $10 billion in new spending and would nix an expected D Block auction that could generate another $3 billion in revenue could be tough to sell politically, even with the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks just a couple of months away.
However, if such legislation enables the flexibility to address multiple broadband needs — for public safety, transportation and utilities, for instance — some Beltway sources believe that the notion would be more palatable politically to fiscal conservatives in Congress.

Political realities

If legally allowed, at least some entities have a tangible interest in pursuing sharing opportunities. For example, the city of Charlotte, N.C., has asked the FCC for permission to allow non-public-safety users to access its proposed LTE network. And other partnerships also are being discussed at a less formal level, Madden said.

“I have a number of public-safety agencies and utilities already talking together; they want to work together,” he said. “The holdup is at the federal-government level.”

Keith echoed this sentiment.

“There’s a lot of people talking about it at the water cooler,” he said. “It’s about trying to optimize taxpayer benefit for the dollar.”