FirstNet ‘public-safety entity’ definition should be broad, but prioritization policies must be clear

Today, the commercial wireless industry suddenly looks remarkably different than the one that existed when Congress created FirstNet less than three years ago, when LTE was just a promising-but-nascent technology. I seriously doubt that anyone on Capitol Hill envisioned the incredible pace of deployment and adoption that has occurred with LTE—and, fortunately, they didn’t need to.

What Congress—following the lead of public safety, which selected LTE as its next-generation communications technology—did recognize was that the commercial wireless market was developing several times faster than the public-safety communications sector. To ensure that public-safety personnel had access to the latest and greatest communication capabilities, the law creating FirstNet wisely aligned the fledgling organization with commercial technologies and commercial standards.

This alignment with commercial standards should not be confused with the notion that FirstNet should just be another commercial network. Public safety has its own requirements for hardening, power backup and resilient/redundant connectivity that are ingrained into its fabric of mission-critical communications. To the greatest extent possible, FirstNet needs to meet those standards while leveraging the economies of scale that the commercial sector brings to the table.

So, who should be allowed on the FirstNet system? That’s the question that has been asked by FirstNet in a recent proceeding regarding its legal interpretation of what is a “public-safety entity” that could be eligible for (but not necessarily given) priority access on the system.

FirstNet staff—not the board, which will set the final policy—proposed a very broad interpretation in the proceeding. The staff proposal stating that a public-safety entity could be almost any organization—or even an individual—that does even the slightest amount of public-safety work.

While generally embraced by the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) and most other respondents, the definition was opposed by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO). In its filing, APCO noted that the intent of Congress was to have the FirstNet system serve traditional public safety—fire, EMS and law enforcement—and not a host of ancillary organizations that may have little, if any, role in day-to-day public safety.

APCO also accurately noted that public safety likely would not have succeeded on Capitol Hill without the support of key commercial wireless carriers (read: AT&T and Verizon), and that FirstNet should not compete with these carriers for subscribers that are not traditional public-safety users.

Now, I was not a direct participant in the conversations that occurred on Capitol Hill as first-responder representatives lobbied to get the 700 MHz D Block spectrum reallocated for public safety, so I cannot state with certainty what Congress meant when it included “public-safety entity” in the language of the law creating FirstNet.

However, I am fairly confident that Congress passed this law with a clear intent that is fairly straightforward: solve the longstanding public-safety communications problems that have plagued the nation so frequently, particularly since the tragic events of 9/11.