Will other states follow New Hampshire’s lead and conduct their own RFPs for public-safety LTE?

This week, the state of New Hampshire announced that it received five bids in response to its request for proposal (RFP) to build a statewide public-safety LTE system. Now, officials in many of the other 55 states and territories likely are asking whether they also should follow the RFP path blazed by New Hampshire.

Like many others in the industry, my initial reaction to the state of New Hampshire’s announcement in December that it had released was one of bewilderment. Not only did the timing seem odd—just days after FirstNet got board approval for its nationwide RFP, which would not be released for another month—but the New Hampshire RFP stipulated that the state LTE network would operate on Band 14 airwaves in the 700 MHz band.

Of course, those frequencies are licensed to FirstNet, not the state of New Hampshire. With this in mind, some industry observers questioned whether vendors would allocate the resources necessary to prepare and submit bids for a project that might never happen. Others wondered—if the identity of bidders was leaked—whether bidders would risk being viewed negatively by FirstNet when pursuing the nationwide business.

Apparently, none of this was a problem, as New Hampshire received five bids. We may never learn about the quality of the bids, but the fact is that they are bids—and there’s a lot of inherent value in that.

Broad conversations with a vendor representative about possibilities can be an important starting point in doing research for a project, but there’s nothing binding about them. In addition, statements made during those conversations may not be entirely accurate, even if there is no intent to be misleading—without proper due diligence, it is difficult for any one person to know all aspects of something as new and complex as public-safety LTE deployments.   

But bids are different. Presumably, bidders have examined the opportunity from all angles before submitting their proposals, which represent a written commitment to execute certain tasks under the conditions established in the RFP.

To use a personal-finance analogy, consider the process associated with buying a house. Visiting model homes and attending open houses is nice for getting an idea about what you’d like, but real negotiations don’t happen until you have a loan-approval letter—somewhat like a bid in the public-safety LTE scenario—in hand.

Now New Hampshire has bids to evaluate, and that process likely will include a lot of give-and-take feedback with bidders, which should give officials some excellent insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with public-safety LTE deployment in the state. This should make New Hampshire much more knowledgeable as it enters into the next critical rounds of state consultation meetings with FirstNet.

For instance, if multiple vendors responding to the state RFP indicate they would cover a certain geographic part of the New Hampshire with permanent LTE sites, then state representatives should be comfortable calling for such coverage in the state plan from FirstNet’s contractor. Conversely, if none of the state RFP bids proposed to meet a given request, demanding that FirstNet’s contractor probably is not realistic.