Why public safety should be excited by FirstNet’s prospects, despite potential delays
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Why public safety should be excited by FirstNet’s prospects, despite potential delays
But we do know that Rivada Mercury officials have proclaimed their bid as 100% compliant with the FirstNet RFP (an assertion that is reiterated in its lawsuit), and Rivada Networks co-CEO Declan Ganley recently advocated for public safety receiving free service—with some limitations—on the FirstNet system. In addition, the announced Rivada Mercury team includes some well-known industry players, including Harris, Fujitsu, Nokia and Black & Veatch.
Such talk got public-safety officials excited about FirstNet’s prospects. Some were skeptical about Rivada Mercury’s prospects of winning, but almost everyone was optimistic that the Rivada Mercury proposal would be legitimate enough force AT&T to bring its “A” game to the table with its bid.
Perhaps that happened. After all, court documents indicate that the evaluation team decided that AT&T’s bid was superior enough to deem that the Rivada Mercury proposal was not worthy of being included in the “competitive range.”
Exactly what the evaluation team deemed to be superior about the AT&T offering is anybody’s guess–this is a very large and multifaceted project with characteristics like coverage, capacity, resiliency, security and financial business models being considered.
But the bottom line is that the evaluation team determined that AT&T’s proposal is clearly better than a Rivada Mercury bid that supposedly meets all of the FirstNet RFP objectives and certainly sounds promising, when described at a high level. If the evaluation team’s assessment is accurate, public-safety officials should be very excited to see what FirstNet will have to offer.
My guess is that some can hardly wait … but they will have to, apparently for quite some time.