Verizon calls for greater interoperability with FirstNet, says public-sector business still growing

One of Verizon’s key advantages in the public-safety space is the carrier’s 450,000-square-mile broadband coverage edge, Maiorana said.

“We’re meeting with states that just finished meeting with AT&T and FirstNet, and they think it’s a great concept,” he said. “But Verizon has 125% more LTE coverage in that state. They’ll never catch up.”

Given these circumstances, Maiorana said he believe public-safety officials will ask AT&T and FirstNet to support full interoperability between the Verizon public-safety offering—one that is designed to mirror the FirstNet feature set—and FirstNet.

“I’m optimistic that [Verizon-FirstNet interoperability] will happen eventually,” Maiorana said during the interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It will be a bottom-up approach where the customer has a loud voice to do this. I’m optimistic that, top down, people will start to realize that it’s the right thing to do. It’s probably too early for the other guys to wave the white flag and say, ‘Sure, Verizon, come and join our contract.’ I’m not sure what motivation they have right now to do that.

“But we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to continue to invest. We’re going to continue to deliver great service. We’re going to win in the market. If Michael Poth, NTIA, the Department of Commerce, the FCC, the U.S. Congress or whoever really understands how this can be engineered and managed, it may be a significant boost for enabling the promise of FirstNet quicker.”

Maiorana credited FirstNet with increasing awareness about first responders’ need for reliable broadband communications, noting that the focus is proving beneficial to first responders.

“FirstNet has really elevated the attention on this segment,” Maiorana said. “Small, medium and large, new entrants and established companies are running toward it. I give [FirstNet CEO] Michael Poth and TJ [Kennedy, former FirstNet president] a lot of credit for getting to this point and for casting this broad light on such a critical segment. It’s only going to help, [public safety benefiting from] all of this innovation coming from industry.

“I think that FirstNet is a tide that’s raising all boats with additional focus to serve this segment. Over time, that will benefit the first responder significantly. I’m not sure that AT&T is happy we’re doing all of this, but I know our customers are happy we’re doing all of this, and that’s our concern.”

Nilan outlined several technical aspects of Verizon’s public-safety offering, including reasoning behind the company’s decision to deploy a virtual public-safety LTE core, as opposed to the physically separate FirstNet LTE core.

“Our core is built on our implementation of a software-defined network here at Verizon,” Nilan said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We started switching our network—our physical network—over to a software-defined network back before 2016, and this is the way that all networks will moved to in the future.

“Historically, a legacy, outdated technology on hardware-based networks requires physical segregation across the network. And, in those environments, you need to have your control plane separated from your hardware plane—from the actual elements that do switching on the network.

“In software-defined networking, you get to remove those elements, consolidate those elements and add in security necessarily next to the virtualization of those elements. What you do is you add in resiliency into the network, so you can move network assets at a moment’s notice.

“Take, for example, the DDoS attacks that happened to many agencies, as well as to many companies across the world. That influx of resources into a network will negatively impact—and shut down—the resources, when they are hardware-based, for network applications.  In a software-defined world, you can dynamically—in real time—move network resources [to address such situations].”

With this in mind, first-responder agencies should view Verizon’s virtualized public-safety LTE core as an advantage, according to Nilan.

“Yes, our network is a virtual segmentation from our award-winning, best-in-class, most-reliable network that’s also built on a software-defined networking platform,” he said. “With that, our public-safety customers get that most-reliable network anywhere they are in the United States—across all of our spectrum bands—knowing that it is reliable and resilient to the core.”