No shortage of compelling story lines for 2014 (Part 2)

911’s funding crisis will push states to act

The 911 sector traditionally has been the runt of the public-safety litter when it comes to federal funding, a situation that often has been compounded by the diversion of fees collected by states and local jurisdictions from wireless 911 subscribers to other purposes. As a result, many public-safety answering points (PSAPs) have been unable to upgrade antiquated systems or take advantage of technology advancements. Now, the funding crisis is so pronounced that many PSAPs are struggling to provide basic service, and some are wondering whether they’ll be able to continue at all. Last November, for instance, residents of Taney County, Mo., rejected a sales-tax increase—by a 58% to 42% margin—that was needed to keep the county’s 911 service going past 2015. Opponents of the measure called it a “Band-Aid,” pointing out that the real problem is that all 911 services in Missouri are funded from a tax on landlines, and only 20% of residents in Taney County still have landlines. In 2015, look for more states to address this inequity by passing laws that impose 911 taxes on all user classifications—landline, wireless, VoIP and pre-paid wireless—as the state of Oregon recently did. Their actions will be guided by the soon-to-be released report from the National 911 Program Office, which last year convened a blue-ribbon committee to study the 911 sector’s funding woes and recommend potential fixes.

Sensor, video and Big Data drive analytics development

The so-called “Internet of Things” is exploding. Cisco Systems, which dubbed the phrase, predicts that there will be more than 50 billion machine-to-machine connections worldwide by 2020. In the meantime, public-safety surveillance and monitoring systems are proliferating—from video surveillance to gunshot recognition, to red-light and speed cameras—and smart-grid deployments also are growing at a fast clip, as are intelligent transportation and automatic crash notification systems. But the important data that these systems generate will be useless, unless agencies have some way of managing it, and technology for gathering information has evolved more quickly than technology for analyzing it. This needs to change, so look for data-analytics solutions providers to step up their efforts this year. Also look for more entities to leverage “Big Data”—the analytical processing of enormous volumes of information using large clusters of computers—to spot trends. The medical community already is doing this with mind-boggling amounts of data to predict medical outcomes for patients. On a similar note, albeit on a much smaller scale, look for law enforcement to further embrace the concept of “predictive policing,” which uses data analytics to prevent crimes. Finally, expect more entities to leverage cloud-based and/or hosted solutions to get the computer firepower that they couldn’t afford on their own.

Things we’d like to see in 2014

• Blue-ribbon committee studying 911 funding models comes up with workable solution.

• Congress resolves FirstNet’s legal standing—i.e., is it a government agency or a high-level government contractor?

• A nationwide certification program for 911 telecommunicators, as well as a new moniker that more accurately describes what they do.

• Nationwide adoption of NATE’s tower-safety best practices or all carriers hire only NATE-member contractors.

• A 700 MHz broadband treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.

• Clear 700 MHz narrowband licensees from FirstNet’s spectrum.

• Movement toward Morgan O’Brien’s vision for private LMR licensees.

• Congress changing course and declaring that T-Band users don’t have to vacate the airwaves in 2021.

• PSAPs universally adopt text to 911.

• A proposed standard for mission-critical voice over LTE is developed in time to be evaluated before the end of the year.