PSAC report: Priority, preemption issues on FirstNet likely limited to secondary users, not public safety

To reach its conclusions, the task team modeled several incident scenarios and projected public safety’s communications needs for each one. Then, task-team members worked with technical experts at PSCR and FirstNet to determine the overall bandwidth need associated with the response for each scenario—projections that Fraser acknowledged are not precise.

“That was a very interesting exercise; we came out of it with a much better understanding,” Fraser said. “It’s still kind of an exercise in trying to guess what might happen, because we’re not using a lot of these applications yet in the field.”

Fraser said he believes that additional study should be done regarding the impact that secondary commercial users will have on the FirstNet network, but LTE technically offers the capability to reallocate bandwidth to public safety “pretty much instantaneously and immediately,” if needed.

A more significant issue for public safety is ensuring that all responders at an incident are assigned roles and labels properly, so that any prioritization scheme dedicates available bandwidth properly, Fraser said.

“The framework we put together is based on assigning roles and labels and information about each user in the field,” he said. “If you don’t get those roles and the assignments correct in the beginning, then the priority and quality of service won’t work the way you want it to.

“It’s going to be very important for local first responders and public-safety agencies to figure out those roles and assignments early on and make sure that gets plugged into the dynamic configuration, so the system works the way it’s supposed to—on a daily basis and during major incidents.”

FirstNet Chairwoman Sue Swenson expressed appreciation for the work that has been done to address priority and preemption issues, which many observers have feared could become an operational problem.

“I remember having this discussion a couple of years ago, and priority and preemption was just a concept,” Swenson said during the PSAC meeting. “It’s so interesting now to hear us talking about it now in terms of how to execute on it, so we’ve actually made a lot of progress in a short period of time.”