FCC to Back National Interoperable Communications Center
FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett warned that building an interoperable wireless broadband network for the nation’s 3 million first responders in the 700 MHz band could take 10-15 years. In a speech to the Silicon Flatirons Center in Denver, Barnett also laid out a number of principles likely to be in the public safety section of the National Broadband Plan and said the FCC likely will back creation of a Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC) to coordinate emergency communications nationwide.
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“The most important year … is the first one,” Barnett said of the proposed public safety network. “The devices are not ready yet. Some of the equipment is not ready yet. It'll take a couple of years perhaps to do that, but you have to start now.” Many localities are anxious to move forward, he said: “There’s a pressure to get something going. It’s not waiting for us.” But Barnett warned several times during the speech that creation of a network isn’t inevitable. “This will not happen on its own,” he said. “We'll have to concentrate to be able to make this work.”
Barnett said the public safety section of the national plan will likely run about 20 pages and be very broad. “That doesn’t mean we have not made a whole lot of other plans for implementation,” he said.
Barnett said he has a traditional phone in his house, but predicted the world will move away from copper. “I think it'll be around for a long time, but I do think we'll see a technology shift where we start moving away from it,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s enough money, regulation and incentive to keep that from happening in the long run.”
The national plan will come to the conclusion that the nation needs a national public safety network and that it will not come cheap. The FCC has examined 27 different funding scenarios. “Some public funding will be necessary to bring it up to … public safety standards,” he said. Resiliency, maybe the back-up power, are questions that need to be addressed with some public funding,” he said.
Among the principles the FCC will lay out, the network needs to be ubiquitous and nationwide, he said. It must allow for some local autonomy with agencies able to choose their own vendors, he said. It must also be IP based and use technology that is commercially available. “That will keep the costs down, over the costs that are currently associated with the narrowband networks,” he said. A final principle is that public safety agencies must have reliable, resilient, guaranteed access to the network.
Answering a question from the audience, Barnett said the FCC may consider approving a technological standard for the network. “One of the things we're considering now is whether the FCC should maybe step out of its current principle of not designating technology,” he said. “We're certainly looking hard at the LTE technology that it seems like everyone is moving toward.” The FCC is also still considering whether utilities and other emergency responders will have access to the network, probably on a secondary basis. “We've taken information on that,” he said. “There has been no hard and fast decision.”