Rural carriers interested in partnering with FirstNet, but urban/suburban opportunities appear limited, CCA’s Berry says

CHICAGO—FirstNet offers commercial-carrier partners a significant opportunity in rural America, but public safety’s needs in urban and suburban locations could be so great that there may not be much capacity left for commercial use on a secondary basis, according to a top official for the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA).

CCA President Steven Berry said his membership—primarily regional wireless carriers, including some that serve rural areas that nationwide wireless providers choose not to cover—are monitoring FirstNet opportunities closely.

“Our carriers are very interested in FirstNet,” Berry said last week during a session at the Big Telecom Event hosted by Light Reading. “The way I look at it is that that’s potentially 20 MHz of spectrum that could be utilized in the rural areas.”

Berry said that public safety’s needs in rural areas typically will not be great, so carrier partners will have plenty of opportunity to utilize FirstNet system capacity in those locations to sell commercial service on a secondary basis. In more densely populated locations, Berry questioned whether there will be much commercial potential.

“In the urban/suburban areas, I don’t know if you’ve seen the list of requirements on FirstNet, but they [public safety] are going to eat up 20 MHz of capacity in the urban/suburban areas fast, with video to the car, video on the police officer, video on the fire-department truck, and two-way video,” Berry said. “There’s not going to be much more for the commercial side in urban/suburban America.

 “Who’s going to use it? In urban/suburban America, it’s going to be used up by the first responders. In rural America, that’s a great opportunity for small carriers and new entrants into the market—especially in IoT [Internet of Things] end-to-end solutions.”

Ensuring that commercial opportunities are available to carriers will be key to ensuring that FirstNet is economically viable, Berry said.

“If they’re going to survive, I think they’ve got to think more commercially oriented in how they deploy that system,” he said. “Our smaller carriers would love to partner with them.”

Throughout the Big Telecom Event session, panelists were asked questions related to the relevance of fourth-generation (4G) technologies like LTE during the next several years, while much of the commercial industry is beginning to shift its intellectual focus to the development of a 5G platform.

Thomas Anderson, Cisco Systems’ principal engineer for mobility architecture and evolution, said he believes the deployment of 4G in areas like public-safety communications and IoT will help ensure that 4G LTE will be used for long period.

“We know that public safety is 4G, it’s LTE,” Anderson said. “As that gets deployed over time—I hope it’s sooner than later, but it will take some time—we’re pretty much sure that that has to have a good, long life cycle. Things like FirstNet public safety extend the life of 4G, because it becomes embedded.

“The same thing [is true] with machine-to-machine and IoT. When you put devices out there that support LTE, and they’re sitting in a car that lasts for 10 years or longer, implicit in that is that technology is supported for that long.”

Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, echoed this sentiment, noting that commercial 3G technologies like W-CDMA continue to be used in most parts of the globe. In fact, in 2020—a year when industry analysts believe that 5G equipment will first begin to appear on the market—about 90% of the world’s population will be covered by 3G technology, while only 70% will be served by 4G, Pearson said.