Public Safety Official Says Outlook Positive for National Broadband Network
Public Safety Spectrum Trust Chairman Harlin McEwen remains optimistic about the prospects for a national public safety broadband network. The form the national pubic safety network will take remains unclear, McEwen said Tuesday at the Wireless Communications Association conference. It may not entail the kind of public-private partnership proposed during last year’s D-block auction.
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“I am perfectly understanding that this could take many turns and different directions before we finally reach the end of the story and it has already done that to one extent or another,” McEwen said. “In one form or another there will need to be some solution for public safety.” Without some offset, such as through the sale of the D-block, the cost of a network could be high, he said. It could be as much as $15 billion to $20 billion as an overlay on top of an existing network or $40 billion to $50 billion built from the ground up.
Finding a solution won’t be easy, McEwen conceded. “It’s a political debate,” he said. “It’s a financial debate. It’s a spectrum debate and it’s very complicated.” The FCC’s work on a reauction of the 700 MHz D-block has ground to a temporary halt since former Chairman Kevin Martin left in January, McEwen said. “We're waiting for a new chairman to walk in the door and hopefully bring a breath of fresh air to this whole discussion.”
Joan Marsh, AT&T vice president of federal policy, said the most workable solution remains partnerships between industry and public safety at local and regional levels. “We do think that the industry will be an important part of the solution in terms of getting a network built,” she said.
Larry Krevor, vice president of government affairs at Sprint Nextel, said if the network is built in pieces it won’t be truly national or provide interoperable communications. “This is a big diverse country,” Krevor said. “People are very different in different places. They have different access to resources. They have different support from governments.”
“The bloom is off the rose” for the public private partnership model proposed by the commission for last year’s auction, said William Andrie, vice president of telecom and spectrum policy at Northrop Grumman Information Systems.