Panel: Politics, funding are the biggest obstacles to interoperability
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Panel: Politics, funding are the biggest obstacles to interoperability
Steve Devine, assistant director of the Missouri Department of Public Safety Interoperability Center, said that his state came up with a solution that addressed both the political and funding challenges.
“The state took the position [that] it would overcome the politics with ‘free,’” Devine said. “The state built a platform that state agencies can use for their internal communications to replace a number of outdated systems. And that same platform can be [used by local agencies for interoperability], or they can join it full time. …
“And the state pays for all of that, because we have to pay that maintenance for that system for the state agencies themselves. So, we offer that as an opportunity for agencies to come on—and some agencies come on and have radios that use it for interoperability, and they retain their existing autonomy on their existing systems. So, having that flexibility is a big thing.”
While politics may be less of an issue in the state of Missouri, governance still is a big challenge, according to Devine, who said the issue is that there is little—if any—existing guidance regarding interoperability resources.
“The VTAC and UTAC channels [VHF and UHF interoperability channels] are classic examples—there’s nobody responsible for putting a plan together. … There are no guidelines, and there is nobody responsible for enforcing any guidelines, if there were any. ” he said.
“You have to come up with a plan, and you have to disseminate it so that folks can be educated. … Usage is a big point. The interoperability channels are important, but how they’re implemented and how you communicate that to others is absolutely critical, as well.”
Education is an important subset of governance, according to John Powell, chairman of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) Interoperability Council.
“Hand an end user—a volunteer firefighter for example—a radio that’s got 2,000 channels and however many 16-channel zones, and you’re going to get the deer-in-a-headlight stare when you ask them to go to zone four, channel nine,” Powell said. “So it’s really important to educate the end user on how to use the radio.”
While many law-enforcement officers receive quarterly firearms training, the only time they are trained on their radios is in the academy, Powell said.
“That almost needs to be reversed,” he said.
Powell spoke of initiatives in the states of Iowa and Colorado that could provide models for turning this situation around. In Iowa, officers get radio training when they qualify their firearms, he said. In Colorado, a multi-tiered statewide program that includes an interoperability component was implemented last year, with the goal of training 70,000 radio users. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) was so impressed with the program—much of the training is available online—that it has certified it as a national program, Powell said.
While training is a crucial element, Hall said that there’s a second, equally important piece.
“You can set [the radios] up properly, and you can train the folks on how to use them, but if you don’t exercise them, you’re going to find out when you’re deployed—when you’re in the heat of battle—that’s when [interoperability] fails. … Training is one thing, but if you don’t exercise it, it’s not going to work.”
We are trying to establish
We are trying to establish interoperability among several fire departments in several counties in the lower Hudson River valley and to do so using the UHF public safety spectrum.
Politics has certainly interfered with this program with the ridiculous planned sale of T-Band Public Safety frequencies. That was clearly done jut to mollify a bunch of dummies in Congress who don’t care about the facts – just want to show some revenue in the LTE project.
Politics is also a big factor in the P-25 program. We cannot get federal grants for radio equipment unless it is P-25, so that means we have to ask for three times as much money to buy P-25 radios which we have to use without any P-25 features for two reasons: 1) there is no P-25 backbone in our area and won’t be for a long, long time; and 2) we’ll be damned if we want to send firefighters into treacherous situations using digital communications.
We will continue to operate on our T-Band portable and mobile radios and build what we have permission to build in the way of T-Band repeaters, but we are severely constrained by the fact that we won’t be able to complete a system to see where additional T-Band repeater sites will be needed, because we won’t get FCC authorization to create them.
Yes, politics and funding
Yes, politics and funding have and do play a big part in agencies not having interoperability, but after working in the public safety communications field for 33 years and seeing what I have seen since 2001 I would put the biggest blame on the vendors of P25 equipment for pricing it so high. The vendors saw the dollar signs in their eyes when the economy was good and federal grant dollars were being given out faster than one can make pancakes to they set their prices high. There are very few ways a department that has been use to paying between $250 to $750 for a portable radio to justify spending over $3,500 for a radio even if it does give their personnel interoperability with other agencies. I personally can address the turf wars and deal with the politics but when a vendor sets a price I can’t change that. Another reason I blame the vendors is they continue to sell proprietary radio equipment and systems that is much less expensive than P25. If they truly wanted P25 to become the “standard of choice” then they should have priced P25 equipment to be the same price as or at least close to the cost of proprietary equipment even if it meant reducing the price of P25 and increasing the price of proprietary equipment. This would have probably made P25 extremely attractive to not only public safety, but to public works, public utilities, school systems and even the business community so all could have interoperability during major incidents and disasters.
On the topic of spectrum, since many federal government and military operations occur in the 380 MHz to 420 MHz and many of the larger cities in our nation like Boston, L.A., New York, etc. use the UHF-T band wouldn’t it have made sense and possibly been less expensive to move all non-government operations off 450 MHz to 512 MHz and put all of local and state government operations to include public safety in the same band to coincide with the military and federal government operations? Think about it
I don’t know about you, but it seems we have two major forces working against us when it comes to interoperability with the first being the vendors and the other being our own federal government (Congress and the FCC).