Small carriers need to get up to speed quickly on...

is going to go fast.” Every governor will have to make a decision on whether to opt in to the network, he said. “You need to start thinking about who is going to influence that decision,” he said. “As many of you have networks that don’t really cross state boundaries, you're confined to a single state, it gives you an audience with that governor maybe and … some level of influence.” First responders want to have the same ability to communicate available to everyone else, said Ed Chao, MetroPCS senior vice president. “When they see these phones that we carry around, they say, ‘Hey, I want one of those. How come I can’t do that?'” There was a general recognition industry has a role to play in improving first responder communications, Chao said. “I'm still trying to figure out … how we want to participate,” he said. “I think that’s why a lot of you are here as well.” Public safety is getting 20 MHz of “great spectrum” in the 700 MHz band, to serve at most a few million subscribers, he said. Small carriers are still asking “how do we solve interoperability and roaming, just for ourselves, in this band,” Chao said. “Everyone trying to solve their own local problems presents an interoperability challenge.” Chao recently served on the FCC’s 15-member technical advisory board for first-responder interoperability, which wrote a report for the FirstNet board. “We really only focused on a small portion of even the technical requirements for interoperability, and that is the core integrated access network interoperability requirements,” he said. “We did not get to into the application realm,” he said. “We did not get into how the opt-out states would fully interoperate.”