FCC PANEL EXAMINES HOW TO BOOST PUBLIC SAFETY TECHNOLOGY
The FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC) wrestled Fri. with how to move public safety operators more quickly toward IP-based systems, including Wi-Fi, while meeting local govt. money concerns. Sean O'Hara, research & communications engineer for the Syracuse Research Corp., said that in the last year public safety had had a greater voice on standards for 802.11 and beyond. But he warned that emergency responders still must be “sold” on the benefits of cognitive radio.
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At a council meeting at FCC hq, TAC member Vint Cerf, MCI senior vp-Internet, suggested a solution might be to shift the risk for exploring new technologies from the public safety community to other govt. agencies. Similar to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf said, the Dept. of Homeland Security has an ARPA that can conduct research in that area. Saying public safety operators can’t gamble on unproved technologies, Cerf said: “None of the people who offer public safety services today are willing to take this risk, nor should they be.” He said the country needed a federal agency doing, and paying for, research on a next-generation platform for public safety services. Several TAC members cited a need for a broad “vision” of the network architecture to which public safety systems must evolve.
“As long as we ask the people who are currently offering these services to take risks, it’s unlikely they are going to make that investment, nor should we want them to,” Cerf said. “So let’s shift the responsibility for opening up these new alternatives to a place that can take some risks, can afford to do the R&D and can do the demonstrations.”
The best way for public safety operators to approach interoperability is to examine the flexibility of the Internet’s packet-based approach, said TAC member David Reed, an MIT professor. That created systems “interoperable at every layer,” he said. “The idea that we are going to specify interoperability application by application and usage by usage is a prescription for failure. And the problem is that the industry and public safety organizations can’t seem to get out of that mode.” Reed attributed that in part to the conservatism of local regulators who wanted proof a new technology would pay off before they agreed to fund it.
Several TAC members said a key challenge for public safety was how to use off-the-shelf technologies while meeting the diverse needs of emergency responders, from SWAT officers to firefighters. O'Hara said research was examining how certain IEEE standards could fit public safety needs. He said, for example, a new working group planned to look at assembling “various portions of IEEE standards” that could be used for 4.9 GHz. The FCC has reallocated 50 MHz at 4.9 GHz for wireless broadband public safety use. Last April, the Commission approved licensing and service rules for that band, which it had allocated to support high-speed data applications for public safety.
O'Hara said public safety operators were beginning to look at meeting some requirements through technologies in other markets, citing Wi-Fi and WiMax. Using such technologies can reduce the cost of public safety equipment and provide operators with the same fast innovation that equipment providers offer to the larger commercial market, he said. Public safety data systems that use 802.11 have started to emerge across the U.S., in part because their price tags are low, O'Hara said. He and others said some emergency response agencies were finding ways to offload communications that weren’t crucial onto commercial networks to free capacity on their own, more secure systems. He said: “We have already done some partitioning to say we can handle some of our data traffic on systems that aren’t as robust as they were in the past. But they are very cheap and they do take care of a lot of our needs.”
IEEE standards 802.11e, 802.16 and 802.20 aren’t designated specifically for high-speed public safety data applications at 4.9 GHz, but O'Hara said they offered quality of service and priority access attractive for that band. While 802.11b has been criticized on security, he said 802.11i addressed that through AES encryption.
Although unlicensed bands have been growing in popularity among some public safety agencies, concerns remain about cognitive radio, O'Hara said. The FCC opened a proceeding last month on how to remove regulatory hurdles to the development of cognitive radios, including possible leasing of spectrum that emergency responders could take in a crisis but that at other times would be available for other uses (CD Dec 18 p1). The Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials said at the time it had “grave concerns” about any attempt to rush that technology to market. Among the concerns O'Hara raised was that public safety users wouldn’t control interference and might not even be aware it had occurred.