House Panel Chairman Worried About Public Safety Interoperability
Government and industry officials disagreed over how far along interoperability standards are for public safety wireless communications. At a House Technology Subcommittee hearing Thursday, witnesses from Harris and Motorola said work on Project-25 (P25) standards for public safety, started in 1989, are mostly finished. But officials from the Homeland Security Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology pointed to interoperability gaps remaining.
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Chairman David Wu, D-Ore., said he’s concerned that public safety can’t always communicate using devices claimed to be P25-certified. “It is not uncommon for police officers, firefighters and other emergency responders from different regions, from a single region or even a single city to be using incompatible communications systems which don’t talk to each other,” he said. “It seems to me that if it’s P25-certified, that we should have taken the standards and testing to a point” where it will talk to all other P25 devices, Wu said. He asked what has delayed standards development and conformance and compliance testing. He also asked about the impact of the delay and when completion of standards and testing was expected.
"There are lots of systems in the field that were labeled P25, but … cannot communicate with each other, sometimes within one manufacturer’s line,” said David Boyd, a director at the Homeland Security Department. Only 1-1/2 of eight standards are ready after work since 1989, said Dereck Orr, program manager of public safety communications systems for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “As a result of the lack of complete standards, only a fraction of any P25 system purchased today is truly standards-based.” Without finished standards, “you cannot have that common implementation that allows for interoperability, and therefore you can’t have open competition” or “multi-vendor interoperability,” he said.
Industry officials painted a rosier picture. “While more work is needed, strong progress has been made in recent years,” said Ernest Hofmeister of Harris. Nearly 70 percent of the U.S. populations is covered by a P25 public safety network, said John Muench, Motorola director of business development. He said standards are “functionally complete,” meaning “there is enough information in the standard for manufacturers” to build products that are interoperable with other vendors. Hofmeister agreed, saying only the “last little bits” of the standards remain unfinished.
Conformance testing would ensure products are P25-compliant, but industry wants to do only performance and interoperability tests, Orr said. “We need to identify problems with products or the standard in the lab, not the field.” More testing is the best way to improve interoperability, said Boyd. “No standard is complete” before tests, he said. But Muench said tests take significant time and money. Too much testing “could slow down the adoption” of P25 “and actually create larger barriers of entry to smaller companies."
"The standards process is probably never going to be fully finished,” because technology is constantly changing and reaching consensus on standards is a slow process, said Boyd. P25 is the only set of wireless industry standards that has taken so long to develop, said Orr. “It doesn’t have to take forever.” P25 has taken longer because the industry is very small and specialized, said Hofmeister. But the pace on P25 has “picked up” since 2005, he said.
While interoperability is important, government must avoid overreaching, said Ranking Member Adrian Smith, R-Neb. “I just hope we don’t have the heavy hand of government establish a mandate that ultimately I think will shut down innovation.” Smith asked government officials how urgent it is to deal with the matter. It’s an “extremely urgent” problem, because public safety must make smart decision when buying equipment, said Boyd. Orr said he “agreed completely."
Wu wants to “seriously consider holding a follow-up hearing to see where we are on this and to clarify issues,” he said. “I'll take responsibility for the fact that perhaps we haven’t dug deeply enough in this particular hearing."
Legislators didn’t ask about the D-block, but that didn’t stop witnesses from Motorola and the International Association of Fire Chiefs. Muench urged Congress to dedicate the D Block to public safety. Chief Jeffrey Johnson, president of the fire chiefs association, said the spectrum shouldn’t be auctioned as proposed by the FCC in the National Broadband Plan. Public safety needs the D-block “to ensure an efficient broadband system which will attract commercial interest and reduce the need for government funding,” Johnson said. “This is our only path to solving interoperability long term, once and for all.”