PSCR partners with FirstNet Authority for June public-safety-communications event

Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) recently announced its partnership with the FirstNet Authority to host 5×5: The Public Safety Innovation Summit, a new June event that is designed to be more “comprehensive” than PSCR’s past annual shareholder meeting, according to officials.

Dereck Orr (pictured above at the last PSCR annual meeting), chief of the PSCR division within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said the partnership is logical, noting that PSCR has focused on public-safety broadband since “before the beginning” and its annual meetings have featured FirstNet Authority speakers since the FirstNet program was established.

Previous PCR stakeholder meetings have focused on potential future innovations—first-responder communications that are not expected to be commercially available for five to 10 years. With the FirstNet Authority partnership, there will be a significant number of 5×5 sessions that address the use of existing solutions or those that should be available in the near future, Orr said.

“Having FirstNet have half the sessions and us having half the sessions, creates—I think, for the first time—a very holistic approach toward looking at public-safety communications, from the operator’s standpoint of deploying and looking at what the users need today, all the way out to what we’ve traditionally done, which is [focus on] what do the users want tomorrow and how do we build that in the future,” Orr said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“I think it rally covers a broad spectrum and becomes a much more comprehensive event—something that brings even more content and value to the shareholders.”

Jeremy Zollo, the FirstNet Authority’s chief market-engagement officer, said there has long been a “great relationship” between the FirstNet Authority and PSCR, so partnering to host the 5×5 event—slated for June 28-30 in San Diego—was a “no-brainer” decision.

AT&T, the FirstNet Authority contractor, is charged with deploying and maintaining the nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) that leverages the 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum licensed to the FirstNet Authority. This initial buildout task is expected to be completed—on time and on budget—by the end of March.

Now, the FirstNet Authority will spend the next 20 years determining how best to enhance the NPSBN while using about $15 billion in discretionary money provided by AT&T under the 25-year contract. Zollo said authority officials hope to learn more about both public safety’s communications needs and the technological possibilities during the 5×5 event and incorporate that knowledge into the FirstNet roadmap.

“I think it’s going to be something that going to help inform the roadmap,” Zollo said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “I think PSCR has always informed the roadmap, if you think about what they’ve done, from QPP [quality of service, priority and preemption] to where we are today.

“We need to know where the research and findings are going, so we can make better-informed decisions. It brings both of those worlds together really nicely.”

PSCR also is in the process of transitioning its organization after spending $300 million—FCC spectrum-auction proceeds that Congress approved in 2012 as part of the legislation that created FirstNet—in federal funds that largely expired at the end of September.

While PSCR and the FirstNet Authority have agreed to partner to present the 5×5 event, there are no other funding associations between the organizations, according to Orr.

“It’s a sign of the continued close coordination and partnership between the two entities, but [there is] no inference toward some kind of organizational or structural change in the future,” Orr said.

Orr explained the reason behind renaming the June event with the 5×5 moniker.

“Traditionally, in radio traffic, 5×5 has meant ‘loud and clear’—it’s been the term given by somebody to say, ‘I’m receiving the signal and audio loud and clear,” Orr said. “We thought that was a great example of what we want to make this conference be, which is to hear our shareholders loud and clear, and for them to hear us loud and clear.

“With both programs [PSCR and the FirstNet Authority], our DNA is in user-driven approaches to how we work. We felt like 5×5 was a great representation—harkening back to an old engineering term—to show the importance of that two-way communications to our stakeholders.”

To get more information about the 5×5 event in June, visit https://www.nist.gov/ctl/pscr/annual-stakeholder-meeting.