Andrew Seybold on Voice Over Public Safety Broadband

Excerpt from original post featured in the Oct. 18 Public Safety Advocate e-newsletter. Read this article and more AndrewSeybold.com.

The Politics and the Technology

As the FirstNet board addresses the architecture for the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network using LTE (Long Term Evolution), one of the issues concerns voice: what to include when. The different types of voice include dial-up for making phone calls, non-mission-critical push-to-talk, and mission-critical push-to-talk (PTT). Then there is off-network, or as the first responder community is accustomed to saying, simplex or talk-around, which is the ability to talk to multiple units without having to be connected to a network. Each of these is important for the Public Safety community, some more than others, and each presents its own technological challenges that will be discussed in more detail later. First, I want to concentrate on the politics of voice on this network.

If the various levels of government believe that the new Public Safety broadband network will be able to satisfy Public Safety’s requirements for voice as well as data services, local and state jurisdictions will stop spending money on their existing Public Safety voice networks that are and will continue to be critical to Public Safety. On a federal level, if Congressional leaders believe that the new network will be able to replace Public Safety voice networks they could convince Congress to require the Public Safety community to return their existing voice spectrum to the FCC so it can be used for other broadband networks. In point of fact, the law that provided Public Safety with the spectrum and the funding for the nationwide broadband network already takes the first step in spectrum give-back requiring agencies in the top eleven municipalities to vacate the T-Band spectrum they have been sharing with TV stations for many years—spectrum that is vital to their ability to serve the public in those areas.

With each level of government, the reasons for wanting to believe that this new network will replace today’s Public Safety voice networks are different but the results would be the same: Public Safety would lose vital spectrum, which would seriously harm their effectiveness and endanger them and the citizens they are sworn to protect...  Read on at AndrewSeybold.com.