No Deep Divide Between Public Safety, FCC, APCO President Says

APCO and other public safety groups have been sharply critical of an FCC proposal to sell the 700 MHz D-block for commercial use and require carriers to accommodate public safety’s needs by providing special access to 700 MHz spectrum on commercial networks. This fundamental disagreement is expected to dominate discussion at APCO’s annual conference in Houston next month.

"From my perspective it’s not a deep divide,” Mirgon said on the show. “I mean, we've had this discussion with the commission many times that they don’t control the spectrum, that they've got laws and rules they have to follow from the Congress on the auction. Granted, we have had a very spirited debate on that broadband plan and the D-block and how that was put together. But that is just one item of so many things public safety works with the commission on."

Members of Congress have started to propose dueling bills to give public safety control of the D-block or in effect to ratify the FCC proposal, Thomas said. Legislation by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., endorses the former course, a bill by House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the latter.

"There is a deep divide,” Thomas said. “Here’s my fear: The divide or disagreement or the spirited debate is overflowing to Congress as we speak. … I hope this argument doesn’t result in something that basically makes the funding go into neutral, because this is the last opportunity … to create a truly interworking public safety network nationwide. … If that funding disappears, the whole thing evaporates."

Thomas said the time has come for the FCC to force public safety, carriers and others to come together to work out a compromise. “I think they should lock the door and shove pizza under the door until people come out with an agreement,” he said. “I honest to God think that we're very, very close. If we made a list … the good things and the bad things, the bad things are very small, but they're very important to public safety. And the real issue is to get it in there and knock those bad things down to a point at least it’s acceptable to public safety or they agree they're willing to swallow it as long as they get something.” Thomas said the FCC “is uniquely positioned” to force a compromise though a process similar to a “24-hour union negotiation."

APCO is willing to come to the table, Mirgon said. “Public safety has always been open to discussion,” he said. “We went down this path because, one, it was our only option, and two, we feel we need we need to be able to control that spectrum to ensure our use and that some regulation is not going to change our access to that spectrum.” Public safety is willing to share the D-block with carriers, he said. “It’s just a difference of who holds the license.”

"This is Washington, D.C.,” Thomas said. “Deals are made all the time, and quite often, both parties to a deal go off not quite happy but willing to swallow it. You can’t do it in front of the TV cameras. You can’t do it in front of the press. You can announce it. My point is, it’s important that those discussions be held intensely, and I think an agreement could be reached."

Mirgon conceded: “We're definitely concerned about timing … just moving the ball forward. We're public safety. We're not D.C. We're not used to spending two, three years debating something. We're used to making decisions and moving it forward.” Mirgon, who recently retired as director of technology services for Douglas County, Nev., said in the past public safety has been forced to deal with a “hodge-podge” of spectrum and building systems that use the 800, 700, 450 and 150 MHz bands. “Spectrum allocation to public safety historically has been like scrap food off a dinner table,” he said. “Nobody has given us sufficient spectrum at one time to solve the interoperability problem. I have referred to this as the last, best hope for interoperability.”

"The issue isn’t the want of spectrum, the issue is legacy systems,” Thomas said. “LMRS is a very old system. It’s kind of like -- my apologies to Motorola -- a 1940s system. You've got one big tower, a high tower, and you're trying to reach people within a large geographic area with all the infirmities of doing that. It doesn’t have a cellular arrangement. That system is extremely limited.” Thomas and Mirgon disagreed sharply over whether public safety needs to control the D-block and whether the FCC’s alternative proposal would work.

"The nature of public safety communications is that quite often, in fact most of the time, it’s lightly used, and then, God forbid, when there’s an emergency, you need a lot of spectrum,” Thomas said. “The issue becomes, ‘How do you provide at a particular time and place the amount of spectrum needed in times of emergency?'” Thomas noted that public safety already has 100 MHz of spectrum, 50 MHz below 4 GHz and 27 MHz below 700 MHz.

"It seems to me the FCC plan deals with that in a very simple way,” he said. “It deals with it by allowing what I've been calling preemption. When I say preempted, I mean if the spectrum is congested, commercial users just get dropped and bandwidth gets allocated. That way you take care of the emergency when there’s heavy use required.”

The FCC plan makes some faulty assumptions, Mirgon countered. “When the commission looked at the current use of spectrum by public safety, and nationally, they did a lot of averaging,” he said. “The problem we have with is that we're not an average. A patrol car is an office. These are people with full laptops in their cars, a lot of technology, license-plate readers, facial recognition coming online.”

The FCC plan assumes wrongly that public safety will mostly need broadband for handheld devices, Mirgon said. “We've got fire departments which have got full laptops in the car,” he said. “These are not handheld devices and what the FCC did was look at handheld device usage. When you start talking about video cameras in buildings to see where suspects are, to see where fire is burning, the ability see a hazmat spill without sending someone in, that consumes a lot of bandwidth. We don’t believe that that was taken into consideration,” he said. “The commission has stated that they believe 10 megahertz is enough today and that we may need more for the future. Well, our issue is we don’t plan for today. We plan for the future.”

Public safety agencies also question how well preemption, as envisioned by the FCC, would work in practice. “You don’t have time to spend an hour, two hours, going through some process with the carrier to get preemption. You need it now,” Mirgon said. “If we manage, control, own the spectrum, it’s a much easier process to execute.” Carriers also have long opposed the kind of “ruthless” preemption proposed by the FCC, he said. “As a matter of fact, they've made statements that are absolutely against it because of having their customers dropped suddenly,” he said. “They operate to make money and the thought of dropping customers by the carriers is not necessarily palatable. … We've had this discussion for 20 years.” Carriers argue, “What about that person who is making a 911 call or what about that person who’s a doctor talking to a patient,” he said. “That has not been a successful discussion.”