Making Good Use of Public Safety Spectrum Will Be Tough, Leaders Admit
SAN JOSE -- U.S. state and local emergency services’ ignorance and orneriness as users is exceeded only by their need for sophisticated wireless broadband services, public safety technology officials said Fri. at a Wireless Communications Assn. Symposium panel here. Effective use of spectrum allocated by the FCC will require much education and patience on vendors’ part and will be an uphill fight, the officials said at the conference. “Public safety is still trying to figure out where we are at with the opportunities available to us,” said Donald Root, interoperability programs coordinator for the Cal. Gov.’s Office of Emergency Services: “We're on the 20- yard line on the left” while “industry is probably on the 50 yard line or the opposing team’s 45,” to the right.
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No doubt the information and communications needs are great, Root said: A San Francisco police officer sent to help in San Jose may need to tap into a Sacramento database. At the Port of Oakland, each of 13 disparate agencies has primary first-responder responsibility. Responding to last week’s Ventura County landslide, the local sheriffs and fire departments needed to coordinate with help brought in from L.A. city and county, Long Beach, and the Dept. of Forestry and other state agencies, as well as neighboring Santa Barbara counties -- each with its own system and officials “in a little myopic world” of their own, Root said.
“There’s got to be a standards-based approach to this,” for interoperability, Root said. Technology must be simple to use, he said; vendors should remember police don’t yet know all the capabilities of their 2-way radios. And the functions must address agencies’ practical needs, Root said. He wondered why scenarios presented for N.Y.C. didn’t contemplate transmission of a firefighter’s biometric data between the Empire State. Bldg.’s top and the street, and said W. Coast and especially L.A. agencies would want helicopter-to-ground communications enabled.
The “public safety commons environment” set up by the FCC runs into the reality of “a somewhat fractured user community,” said Stephen Devine, Communications Div. patrol frequency coordinator for the Mo. Highway Patrol and National Public Safety Telecom Council Spectrum Management Committee chmn. He referred to public safety as 50,000 customers, each with its own CEO and each of which thinks it knows best for its turf and defies vendors to tell them differently.
“Historically, they've been a pretty parochial bunch,” Devine said. Now these loners face a choice between controlling their own small slice of spectrum or sharing to gain greater benefits. Without having defined their needs, he said; most agencies would choose not to cooperate. Further, many officers on the streets place little or no value on mobile broadband data in relation to their life-saving mobile radios, Devine said. Root agreed: “The commons approach for public safety is going to be a tough nut to crack.”
FCC actions increasing available spectrum by orders of magnitude “elevated public safety imaginations to unoxygenated heights,” said William De Camp of Cal. General Services Dept.’s Telecom Div., who’s chmn. of the northern Cal. 700 MHz/4.9 GHz Regional Planning Committee. A 2000 survey of southern Cal. agencies found demand for 10 times the available spectrum -- but no clear idea of the applications available to use it, he said. Buying appetites have been dampened by budget reductions combined with increased workloads and lack of exposure to capabilities that high bandwidth enables, De Camp said.