Public Safety Still Coming to Grips with How Agencies Would Use a Broadband Network

Ralph Haller, chairman of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, said how first responders will use the network won’t be clear until its up and running. “It’s an evolutionary process,” Haller said. “In some respects people don’t know what they want until it’s offered. If you take the basic telephone, people survived for centuries without it. Once that capability was there, they suddenly couldn’t live without it.” The same will be true for broadband, he said. “It’s very hard for a first responder to sit down and say here’s a list of 25 things I absolutely need at this point.”

Harlin McEwen, chairman of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, noted that the NPSTC Broadband Task Force is already developing a report on the applications public safety needs and will use. “I believe that we're actually doing pretty well in defining what we need,” he said.

Bill Schrier, chief technology officer for the city of Seattle, said streaming video, for example, will change how first responders operate. He noted that every squad car in Seattle is equipped with a digital video camera. “Whenever there’s a car stop, its recorded in the vehicle because there’s insufficient bandwidth in the wireless networks to be able to transmit that,” Schrier said. “Think about the safety of the officer and the citizen if all of a sudden the dispatch center could see what’s happening in real time or better yet the officer’s sergeant could see what’s happening.”

Most of the applications public safety will actually use require little bandwidth, said Charles Brennan, deputy secretary for Pennsylvania’s Office of Public Safety Radio Service. First responders “need access to the National Crime Information Center, warrants, missing persons [reports], stolen cars, state data bases, local data bases … most are happy with that, especially those who don’t have it,” he said. Another big application, he predicted, is technology that will allow police to check fingerprints against a database from the field.

Brennan was less enthusiastic about streaming video in patrol cars. “Do you really want the cop looking at streaming video while he’s moving along at 60 miles an hour, and they will do it,” he said. “Having put mobile data computers in a car in Philadelphia, I could tell you how many of my cops ended up in the trunk of the car in front of them looking at the mobile data computer.”

FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said in opening comments he sees many potential ways first responders could use broadband. He cited as one example, firefighters having access to recent video of a fire scene, blueprints of the building on fire and information on the location of hazardous materials on the way to fight a blaze.

“Even I can see the amazing benefits that broadband technologies offer right now in being able to get the information that our public safety needs in a quick and efficient manner,” Barnett said. “We also know that public safety answering points can utilize broadband technologies to a greater extent and in numerous ways. They can assist public safety entities in making emergency response more timely and more efficient.”

One recurring question was how much spectrum is enough to meet the needs of first responders. “We're being asked what you need and how much spectrum do you need and how speedy does that spectrum have to be for you to achieve what you need to achieve,” said Steve Souder, director of the Fairfax, Va., Department of Public Safety Communications. “To a large degree we don’t know the answer to some of those questions. We kind of have a vague idea about what we need, but how much spectrum we need to make that happen and how fast that spectrum has to be is still to be determined.”

“I think everybody in the commercial world or in the public safety world would tell you we need more bandwidth,” said Erika Olsen, special counsel to the Public Safety Bureau. “Tell me how much is more. How do you justify that? Have you done the studies? You're telling me you may not necessarily know what applications you want to ride over this. How do you figure out how much is more?”

“More is definitely different than where we are today,” McEwen replied. “Right now the only spectrum that is available is narrowband spectrum and that spectrum brings very slow speed data.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Olsen replied. “You do have 50 MHz at 4.9 GHz, which is broadband.” “It’s not practical for wide area networks,” McEwen answered. “We were told somewhere around 37,000 sites were necessary to build out 700 MHz to the degree that we would like in this country. To do that with 4.9 [GHz], they tell me, would require 60 million [sites].”

Another major issue raised was who would build a single national network or regional networks and who would pay for it.

“A lot of money is going to be spent doing some sort of rollout for public safety, and with a lot of money comes a lot of questions,” said Stephen Carter, vice president of technology at Qualcomm. “I would not go so far as to say public safety’s needs should be met entirely through provisioning service to them though commercial carriers. [Carriers] can do that today. For many it makes a lot of sense. Many local police, fire and other agencies contract with their local carriers today to get service. As a national model that probably falls short.”

Carter said Qualcomm, the lone bidder for the 700 MHz D-block in last year’s auction, remains a supporter of selling the spectrum as part of a public-private partnership. “We'd like very much to think that it could work a second time because it would provide the needed funding to deploy a system,” he said. “Absent that we're going to have to find some funding mechanism.”

Dan Phythyon, former FCC Wireless Bureau chief and now a FEMA official, said funding is a key question. “We have barely scratched the surface today,” he warned. Phythyon said improving emergency communications nationally provides significant challenges. “We heard again today something that we hear very frequently, which is the technology, as difficult as it can be, is the easiest part,” he said. “What is the rest of what you need to do to make emergency communications work? It’s the people stuff, the softer stuff, the governance, standard operating procedures, training and exercises, usage issues, funding issues.”

Brennan added that interoperable radios alone don’t guarantee better emergency communications. “Our hardest thing, believe it or not, is to figure out how we get all the people to talk once we connect them,” he said. “It has proven to be a much more difficult problem than the technical side of the equation.”

“I'd say the problem is fragmentation, every state and local group having a slightly different system,” Carter said. Interoperability alone is not enough, he said. “I come from an industry where we have learned that when you have a unified market -- a lot of people all asking for the same thing -- an amazing amount of money gets spent. … You get amazing new capability deployed,” he said. “That’s very different from what happens when each different police department, each different state, is making a decision for their few thousand users and you don’t get the economies of scale.”

A second panel Tuesday focused on hardening of a public safety network and protecting it from cyberattacks.

Marcus Sachs, executive director of National Security & Cyber Policy for Verizon Government Affairs, said the public safety network must be separated as much as possible from the rest of the Internet. “There’s lots and lots and lots of cyberproblems,” Sachs said. “They range from Internet fraud, which we're all very familiar with, to phishing sites, credit card theft, identity theft,” he said. “We have a lot of malware, malicious software; this is code we don’t even know we've downloaded onto our computers.”

Faster networks create additional risks, Sachs said. “As we get more, faster, creative types of applications we're going to have more, faster and creative types of threats, people who want to do bad things,” he said. “We've got countries now that are targeting us. They would like very much to go after our public service networks. They'd like very much to attack our soft underbelly.”