Verizon Frontline supports U.S. Forest Service efforts against wildfires

Verizon Frontline increased its support of entities responding to wildland fires during 2022, particularly the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which accounted for more than half of this activity by the carrier’s Crisis Response Team, according to the carrier.

Cory Davis, Verizon’s assistant vice president for public safety, said that Verizon Frontline provided communications support to the USFS for 110 responses in 14 states, including incidents involving 49 names wildfires.

“We loaned [to USFS] just over a thousand pieces of equipment—think Cradlepoint routers, phones, Jetpacks, mobile-asset needs—SPOT trailers, SatCOLTs, COWs,, etc.—holistically across the country,” Davis said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

And such wide-ranging support from Verizon Frontline—provided at no costs to agencies—was needed during 2022, which saw 10,000 more wildfires than in 2021—and in different locations, according to Davis.

“If you look back for the past five or 10 years, a lot of [the fire-response support provided by Verizon] was in the west—Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, Southern California. But [in 2022,] we had responses as far away as Florida, North Carolina, Michigan and Minnesota,” he said. “So, we started seeing wildfires pop up across the country in places where they’re traditionally and typically not a concern.”

No matter the location, first-responders’ desire for broadband communications keeps growing, Davis said.

“What we’re seeing—not only in wildfires but down in [Florida during the aftermath of] Hurricane Ian—is just that the appetite for data-intensive applications is continuing to be more and more prevalent,” Davis said.

“I got the opportunity to visit a few fire base camps, and all of the incident commanders told me, ‘Look, we’re putting everything up into the cloud. We’re using a lot of video now, a lot of drone footage, a lot of ultra-high-def cameras.’ So, as you can imagine, that need for speed and that need for capacity is just getting greater and greater, based on the feedback we’re getting from these incident commanders.”

This reality has changed the connectivity challenge that broadband providers like Verizon must meet in order to fully support agencies responding to a wildfire, Davis said.

“Four or five years ago, 30 (mbps) down and 10 up was probably good enough,” Davis said. “But now, we’re seeing—especially as we continue to integrate things like MEO and LEO [satellite connectivity]—that when we can give them lower latency and higher bandwidth, they can do more.”

Today, GEO satellites are much more robust, providing downlink speeds of 100 mbps and uplink throughput between 20 and 30 mbps, Davis said. Meanwhile, a MEO solution deployed at Fort Myers Beach in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian provided “a consistent 250-300 down and a very, very consistent 30 to 50—and even upwards of 80—up,” he said.

“[The MEO BISON solution] was taking a lot of traffic,” Davis said. “It was literally taking all of the traffic from the Florida task-force team that was down there. It was very, very consistent.

“It’s almost like a 5G environment. Obviously, the latency’s going to be a little higher with MEO [than a terrestrial-based wireless link], but you’re getting that speed and additional capacity, so that [first responders] can see high-def, 4K video using ultra-high-def cameras and things like that, which require more gigabytes of data to transport.”

Davis said this need for increased broadband is driven by a variety of use cases, including agencies’ use of multiple video applications, from real-time video during a response to post-incident surveillance. Even daily briefings by incident commanders increasingly are being conducted via video, he said.

In addition, the use of IoT sensors and predictive analytics to predict and detect fires as they occur—and project the direction and speed of their spread—increasingly is a tool being used throughout the firefighting community, Davis said.

“We’re actually working with multiple partners and different solution OEMs … that are using AI and IoT to help catch fires and predict when they might occur,” Davis said. “In terms of getting that predictive analytics ahead of time, we’re seeing that 5G is definitely going to help these systems be a lot more effective and a lot more sophisticated down the road—not only for detecting these wildfires and preventing them, but also keeping the wildland firefighters safe, by using biometrics data and things like that.

“So, when they go into these really bad areas, they not only have situational awareness around the fire and the community, but also the personnel who are literally running into the crisis and helping stop these fires. There’s a lot of great stuff to come, but that requires a bigger [data-throughput] pipe.”

Davis said he is confident that Verizon is positioned to provide the needed broadband connectivity to first responders, noting that the carrier recently surpassed 200 million people within its 5G Ultrawideband coverage area, and this footprint continues to grow. In addition, the carrier is leveraging its licensed mid-band and millimeter-wave spectrum on deployable solutions to support public safety in locations beyond its terrestrial-network coverage.

“We’re able to bring the technology in [on deployables], but I can tell you that once we get the rest of our C-band spectrum at the end of the year, and our full network buildout—from a capex perspective—is complete, we’re going to have 5G Ultrawideband nearly everywhere we have 4G LTE today, because we have licenses across the entire country,” Davis said. “We’re going to have—on average—160 MHz across the country, and we’re going to hit over 40 million people with 200 MHz.

“So, we have a lot of spectrum coming, and we’re looking forward to unleash this specifically for public safety. They need that bigger pipe. We’re providing that today, but we’re going to be able to provide it at another level toward the end of the year.”