FirstNet Growth Continuing, Board Told at First Meeting Under New Leadership
The FirstNet Authority Board held its first meeting Wednesday under new Chair Richard Carrizzo and new Executive Director Joseph Wassel. The meeting was over in 35 minutes.
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Wassel, a 34-year veteran of DOD, said in 38 days onboard he has met “almost everyone” at FirstNet. He compared his experience so far to “drinking from the fire hose.” Wassel said he first focused on FirstNet when Teri Takai, then a board member and DOD chief information officer, came back from a meeting in 2012 and asked whether DOD has any first responders and whether it cares about FirstNet. “The short story is” DOD has 150,000 first responders inside 6,000 facilities worldwide, Wassel said. DOD cares about FirstNet and some of the department’s adoption rates are “very impressive,” he said.
The FirstNet network, being built by AT&T, continues to grow, said Jocelyn Moore, chair of the board’s Programs and Future Planning Committee. FirstNet has added some 300,000 connections since the board’s last meeting three months ago, to a total of more than 4.7 million, she said. More than 25,000 public safety agencies and organizations across the nation are using FirstNet, she said.
More than 590 FirstNet-ready devices are available to be used by public safety, along with more than 200 unique public safety apps in the FirstNet catalog, Moore said. FirstNet spectrum has also been deployed across the U.S. and in all U.S. territories, she said.
Moore said the committee recently received the final operational capability report for FirstNet’s Band 14 spectrum. Even though "final" is part of the name, “there is still much more work to do after … to fully realize the potential of FirstNet, and we look forward to growing the network beyond the contractually required Band 14 coverage or this initial build out,” she said. The committee also saw a new live demonstration of internal FirstNet dashboards that provide an overview of coverage “so that we can really begin to leverage and track progress” on the network, Moore said. “It will also help us as we continue to hold AT&T accountable” and “make sure that we are delivering for the first responder community, consistently.”
Brian Crawford, chair of the Finance and Investment Governance and Risk Committee, said a recent audit of the authority’s budget raised no issues, for the 10th year in a row. “It is not an easy task to have audits done continuously year after year and come back with no findings,” he said.
Wassel joined FirstNet in March (see 2303100023). Carrizzo, fire chief for the Southern Platte Fire Protection District in Missouri, was named last week to replace Stephen Benjamin, who left for a White House job (see 2303010031).
Each of the five previous chairs “provided great leadership to the board and the first responder and worked tirelessly for them,” Carrizzo said. He said he visited the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum in New York with his family last week and encountered someone whose father had died in the Twin Towers during the 2001 attack. “It hit me very quickly why we are here today, and that’s because of 9/11,” he said.