Buildout of FirstNet sites with Band 14 capability still ahead of schedule, AT&T official says
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Buildout of FirstNet sites with Band 14 capability still ahead of schedule, AT&T official says
All of these new sites being built for FirstNet will be hardened to support public safety’s reliability needs, Sambar said.
“Every new site that’s going in is getting generator backup—that’s standard on all of these new sites,” he said. “We are also in the process of retrofitting a number of older sites that had battery backup. With some those sites that have battery backup, we’re in the process of giving them generator backup.
“Ensuring that public safety has the public-safety-grade network that they’re looking for is obviously very important to us.”
Such hardening measures also are being implemented at many of AT&T’s existing sites, Sambar said. Where cell sites are located close enough to provide overlapping coverage in the case of a site becoming unavailable—a common situation in urban and suburban areas—AT&T will not harden all cell sites, he said.
“This network will have the benefit of public-safety-grade construction, generators [for backup power], as well as overlapping sites,” Sambar said. “If you have one or two sites go down, you may have three or four sites that can overlap and provide coverage [in the locations that downed sites covered primarily]. We are very confident that we are going to give them what they [FirstNet subscribers] want.”
Sambar emphasized the importance of FirstNet oversight of all aspects of AT&T’s development of the NPSBN, which is unique among all carriers that provide broadband services to first responders.
“The FirstNet Authority is looking at everything that we do,” Sambar said. “Every site that we put Band 14 on, the FirstNet Authority checks and validates to make sure that it’s working the way that it’s supposed to work and that they’re getting the coverage that we said we would give them in the contract.
“It’s the same thing here with public-safety-grade [deployments]. The FirstNet Authority is checking everything to make sure that we’re doing exactly what we say we’re going to do. It should be a good peace of mind for first responders that everything is being validated by the authority.”
AT&T also is seeing a marked increase in the frequency with which it is receiving requests for deployable units that can provide additional LTE coverage and capacity to support first-responder communications during response efforts. In fact, the rate of requests for cell-on-wheels (CoWs) or cell-on-light-trucks (CoLTs) from last year, so AT&T decided to “completely revamp our process” for addressing such requests, Sambar said.
“Now, there’s a dedicated call center for FirstNet,” he said. “If you subscribe to FirstNet and you call into care, you automatically get routed to FirstNet care, because it knows your SIM card. If you want to request a CoLT, that care center.
“They’re getting these things deployed in just a matter of hours … It’s a huge program that we’ve developed, and it’s a whole new process.”