Harris County to expand public-safety LTE network, other early builders prepare to complete projects

Mallon said that 35 of the permanent fixed LTE sites have been built, 21 are under construction and five sites have been permitted and will be started soon. With 15 cells on wheels (COWs) expected to deployed in fixed locations, there are only three sites in the LA-RICS LTE system that lack building permits, he said.

After the network is constructed, LA-RICS will begin provisioning user equipment, as well as test and optimize the network, Mallon said. Full operations on the network likely will not begin for several months, he said.

In New Jersey, the first of the deployable systems on wheels (SOWs)—cells on wheels (COWs) that include an evolved packet core (EPC), so it can support incident-area communications independent of connectivity to the main network—went on line this week, according to Fred Scalera, public safety broadband manager for the state of New Jersey. In addition, the SOWs have redundant backhaul, he said.

“All of our SOWs are backed up live over satellite,” Scalera said. “It’s about 70 milliseconds failover from fiber to satellite, and our network stays up,” Scalera said. “It’s low bandwidth, so we’ll probably lower access to video, but voice is no issue.”

Although the system is not fully operational yet, the New Jersey LTE network was used recently to augment bandwidth for surveillance-video applications for a recent concert in a location that previously had been problematic, but the extra throughput allowed video to work properly, he said. Assets from the New Jersey network will be used to support public-safety communications when Pope Francis visits the United States next month.

Jacqueline Miller, deputy secretary for the state of New Mexico’s department of information technology, said four the state’s six permanent fixed public-safety LTE sites have been completed, and the system will include a single cell on wheels.

New Mexico’s system will utilize the EPC of the ADCOMM911 network in Adams County, Colo., a 19-site system that is the only public-safety LTE network that has completed its constructions plans, Miller said.

Walt Leslie, assistant director of technology for ADCOMM911, said the agreement with New Mexico caused ADCOMM911 to establish virtual core networks.

“One of the things that we’ll be proving is what happens when you lose that connectivity between the devices and how much functionality is still retained,” Leslie said.

The ADCOMM911 system is being used by local responders to support a variety of applications, including mobile dispatch and field reporting, Leslie said. The network also is used as a real-world networking testbed by FirstNet’s technical office, which is located in nearby Boulder, Colo., he said.