FirstNet should consider application needs while designing network, Mutualink official says

One other option that may prove to be useful and economical is one that leverages the capability of both Wi-Fi and LTE technology, Boucher said.

“The LTE pipes are great, but you can extend that functionality by putting in an on-scene Wi-Fi bubble system, as well,” he said. “Even if you had a cell on wheels that required backhaul, at least if you put in a local system with a Wi-Fi bubble for collaboration, all of the users within that bubble could use that [Wi-Fi] bandwidth, and then you could use the LTE to get back to the remote connectivity you needed. That could be a very economical hybrid [approach].”

Although the white paper includes information about Mutualink’s work with early public-safety LTE deployments, such as the one in Harris County, Texas, the bulk of the document is designed to be “vendor agnostic” and address some of the “inevitable” challenges that FirstNet’s technical staff will face when making network-design decisions, Boucher said.

And there will be some very difficult decisions to make as FirstNet tries to build a system that is unprecedented and will try to address a number of factors that are unknown today, Boucher said.

“At the end of the day, there is a huge chicken-and-egg question here,” he said. “Because, until [public-safety] people have the capability and have the network, they’re not quite sure what they’re going to do with it. And, until people are sure what they’re going to do with it, it’s hard to architect the network to do that.

“I wish I could throw some silver bullet out and say, ‘This is the way to implement it,’ but I can’t.”

The Mutualink white paper can be downloaded at http://www.mutualink.net/FirstNet-Whitepaper.asp.