What FirstNet can learn from statewide LMR systems

Since the creation of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), there has been no shortage of thoughts, opinions and conjecture regarding the task for which it was created. Congress gave birth to FirstNet when it enacted the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, tasking the authority—an independent entity operating within the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—with creating the first nationwide broadband communications network for first responders.

It is a daunting project that has been compared aptly to the building of the Interstate Highway System, another nationwide endeavor that took decades to complete and cost billions of dollars to build.

In terms of terrestrial-network coverage, FirstNet will use Long-Term Evolution (LTE), a commercial platform that is very different than the land-mobile radio (LMR) technologies that public-safety agencies have been using for decades. Eventually, the FirstNet system will need to integrate with next-generation 911 technology that will be implemented by the nation’s public-safety answering points (PSAPs).

Such is the complexity and scope of the FirstNet project that certain phrases have been uttered repeatedly—in fact, so often that they have begun to resemble modern-day adages. These include such phrases as “There’s no playbook for this,” “There’s no roadmap for this,” FirstNet will have to “blaze a new trail,” and “this network is completely unprecedented.”

However, the thing about adages is that they generally are rooted in truth. And the truth in this instance is that numerous precedents exist to help guide FirstNet in its mission. Indeed, there’s plenty to be learned from the statewide digital LMR systems that came before, particularly in the area of outreach—which could turn out to be the most vital, and most vexing, task of all.

FirstNet will need to meet numerous milestones if this network is to come to fruition, each crucial in its own right. The first involves creating an infrastructure for everything that was to follow, beginning with the naming a board of directors and determining how FirstNet would interact with the NTIA to hiring staff members qualified to develop the broadband system and implement the broader vision.

Next will be the critical tasks of developing a network design and a long-term funding mechanism, which are primary components of the roadmap approved by the FirstNet board earlier this month. Neither will be easy or quick to accomplish.

But the final task—convincing individual public-safety agencies to join the network once it is built—arguably will be the most challenging and the most important of all. That’s because taxpayers could be stuck with the greatest white elephant in the nation’s history, if FirstNet fails in this task.

Without effective outreach, it might not matter whether FirstNet builds the most advanced public-safety communications network in history—if first-responder agencies don’t trust the network or don’t believe they can afford to utilize it, they won’t join it.

That’s where the statewide public-safety radio systems come into the picture, according to Brad Stoddard, director of Michigan’s Public Safety Communications System (MPSCS), which was launched a decade ago to replace a legacy analog system that the state police had been using since the 1940s.

“If FirstNet herded those of us who are managing these large systems and asked us about the hurdles that we faced and how we overcame them … they could take note of those and meet those challenges long before they build the network,” Stoddard said. “That’s easy, low-hanging fruit. The notion that nobody has done this before [isn’t true].”