PSCR panel, attendees tackle controversial local-control aspect of proposed FirstNet LTE system
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PSCR panel, attendees tackle controversial local-control aspect of proposed FirstNet LTE system
Williams said he is particularly passionate about the subject, because an inability to communicate in 1986 resulted in Williams being exposed to hazardous materials that resulted in a five-day stint in the hospital, during which time it was questionable whether he would survive.
“Here we are in 2014, talking about the same stuff. It is shame on public safety, my friends,” he said. “It’s true, everybody doesn’t always get along, but why is that? Why can’t public safety, as an entity, start to learn from its mistakes and start cooperating and build on something that we have an opportunity to build on?
“These are good conversations, and—with good minds and people helping other people get along—we can get this done. If we don’t get it done, we will have failed as a community.”
One audience member noted that prioritization is more important on an LMR network, because capacity is limited by the nature of narrowband technology, while LTE on FirstNet spectrum will provide 100 times more voice capacity than is available today.
Indeed, LTE offers much more capacity than LMR, but the capacity issue revolves around data, photos and video—not voice—that will be driven by machine-to-machine connectivity and situational-awareness applications, according to another audience member, Mike Barney, chief LTE engineer for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“The challenge is going to be how do we efficiently move that data, not necessarily voice,” Barney said. “I have a little bit of background in some of the military intelligence systems, and it is very easy to swamp 10 MHz, with machine-to-machine and situational awareness [communications]. We really need to start looking at what are these additional systems going to add, and we need to start looking at the future here, because I also believe that voice is going to become something that’s infrequently used.
“Instead of saying, ‘Adam 12, meet the woman at such-and-such for a 459,’ there’s going to be a display that automatically goes to the GPS, [the officer is] going to press a button—he may not even have to press a button—and there’s virtual voice involved. I hope, as we go through this, we realize that we probably don’t have an idea how much data we’re going to use, but I’ve never found any system that has enough.”
Everyone is getting way down
Everyone is getting way down in the weeds on this one. All we need to do is prioritize the bandwidth to Priority 1 and 2 users; Priority 3 usage will be limited in that geographic area until the incident commander says so…locally. All this talk about data traffic, video and handsets is not affective. Simplify this to overall Priority 1 and 2 users have precedence; even Priority 1 has precedence to Priority 2, but we will never come close to knocking anyone off the bandwidth (notice I did not say spectrum). This is another reason why trying to prioritize the spectrum is not a good idea, these kind of issues get raised.
As for Local Control, it will be mandated. State’s have their own legislative processes and controls that demand it, thus the reason we have local Police, Fire and EMS type services.
Example: we have the FBI at the Federal level, but States have their own internal Bureaus of Investigations as well. States have their own Emergency Management Organizations as does the Feds with FEMA. There is no such thing as a National Police Force, not yet anyway, they are always local. There is no one else to control an incident except local guys, unless a Federal Organization requests permission from the Governor of the given State to step in and help.
Just my thoughts. What do I know.
I’m just some guy and a blog…
This is a classic mistake.
This is a classic mistake. You have to think a little deeper than this. Who actually qualifies as a priority 1 user? How can that be dynamically determined, in a system in which static prioritization is established. This has been debated since cellular “prioritization” first started and can never be settled. Do fed responders (at any level including a buck private) have a higher priority than an EMS responder? System management can and never will be managable at the network level. By trying to settle network level use priorities before a network is even built is foolish. System use and priorities have to be dynamic and under the control of governance and command/control systems that can manage it on an incident by incident basis. While most do not wnat to think that it involves this much work, it really does and should. All systems require active use management, if they are going to be efficiently used and provide availability when needed.
Local control of FirstNet is
Local control of FirstNet is and will be a major issue in the months to come.
Maybe we should take notice of how the MABAS system in the Midwest works. In the event of a major fire or EMS incident, all communications for that incident are taken over by the regional MABAS communications center.
This leaves the local agencies with their communications channel (or IP subnet) free for local traffic.
The question is that of bandwidth at this point. This is specifically why I’m against permanent video use on FirstNet unless there is a way to remotely shut it down in such an incident to free up the bandwidth.
Some chatter that I’ve overheard indicates that some think that a community camera system could be entirely based on a FirstNet platform.
Just a few of my thoughts on this issue.