GAO report identifies several FirstNet challenges, ignores multiple key factors

“According to one major carrier we spoke with, no business is likely to enter into a partnership with FirstNet because its public-safety user base has not been defined, and thus the network’s capacity available to secondary (commercial) users is unknown,” the GAO report states.

While acknowledging these legitimate risk factors, several other key elements that will influence FirstNet’s economic viability were downplayed or ignored in the GAO report. Some notable omissions include potential costs associated with cybersecurity, the impact that a downturn in the spectrum market could have on secondary-use revenues, how leveraging Wi-Fi/small cells have altered wireless-network deployment strategies, and the opportunities that FCC rules to encourage broadband deployment in rural areas could have on backhaul costs from remote sites.

But biggest oversight is the potential impact that mission-critical voice over LTE could have on FirstNet adoption.

Citing another GAO report released three years ago, the GAO report says that mission-critical voice over LTE will not be an alternative to LMR voice services in the “foreseeable future.”

Three years ago, I agreed with that GAO assessment, because there was no reason to believe that carrier-driven 3GPP—the organization that oversees LTE standards—would have any interest in developing a mission-critical LTE voice standard for U.S. public safety. Many also questioned why carriers would want to create direct-mode capability—a key component of mission-critical voice—when they get paid for the amount of voice and data traffic on their networks.

But a lot has changed in three years. Wireless data usage has grown so fast that carriers are looking feverishly for ways to offload traffic from their networks. Wi-Fi networks are the primary method, but a peer-to-peer mode could help address the issue, as well. In addition, carriers recognize that this is not just a U.S. issue but a global opportunity, because several nations around the world have declared LTE as their next-generation public-safety communications technology.

Today, the standards for the underlying technology to make mission-critical voice over LTE a reality are in place, and a special working group—headed by an official from the United Kingdom, which wants to replace its TETRA public-safety network with LTE—has been established to develop a mission-critical voice by next spring. If this happens, LTE equipment supporting the mission-critical voice standard should be available in early 2018, when FirstNet deployments likely will be in their peak period.