AT&T Receives $6.5 Billion To Build Wireless Network For First Responders (reuters.com)

The First Responder Network, FirstNet, an independent arm of the Department of Commerce, has awarded a contract to AT&T to build a nationwide wireless broadband network to better equip first responders. "FirstNet will provide 20MHz of high-value, telecommunications spectrum and success-based payments of $6.5 billion over the next five years to support the network buildout," AT&T said in its announcement. Reuters reports: The effort to set up a public safety network was triggered by communications failures during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when first responders were unable to effectively communicate as they used different technologies and networks. The FirstNet network will help emergency medical personnel, firefighters and police officers communicate vital information on one single network in real time, as opposed to using thousands of separate, incompatible systems. The rollout of the network, which will cover will cover all states, five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, will begin later this year, AT&T said on Thursday. AT&T will spend about $40 billion over the period of the 25-year agreement to build, operate and maintain the network.

Comments

Re:What frequency?

[Tailhook]

Based on this it appears to be 769-798MHz based on the guard bands for FirstNet, so near typical UHF cell network frequencies.

15 years to get this ball rolling. And there's no credible answer for how this will serve anything outside major urban areas. Basically we've found a way to justify nationalizing first responder comms. Henceforth the deals with be handled in Washington by the "right" people. Yay.

I work on a volunteer ambulance and am a ham

[slimjim8094]

I'm ICS 100, 200, 300, and NIMS 700 certified, so I definitely buy the need for coordination - but this is a lot of the same stuff that people have been talking about forever, and they've been trying to throw money at the problem with absolutely no success. And our agency actually responded (before I joined) to the staging area at Jersey City on 9/11/2011. (There were effectively no injuries - everyone was fine and dusty, or dead...)

We mostly use a UHF system on a spare frequency the police already had a repeater set up for. It's a huge upgrade from our low-band VHF system (46MHz) that was unrepeated, though we still use that for dispatch because we can't afford to buy UHF pagers for everyone. We have no shortage of frequencies, and can mostly talk to the people we need to talk to, but it's not easy. On our UHF radio we can talk to our police, ourselves, one of the two neighboring towns' police departments - the other one is on a trunking system we can't access, so we have their fire department programmed in (which doesn't do us any good except at a fire standby).

We have a VHF radio for exactly this sort of cross-agency collaboration, but it's hardly simple. There's 4 different state police frequencies, there's something called JEMS which has 5(?) frequencies, some of which are used for normal operations by some city's paramedic team, and several other tactical (VTAC) frequencies as well. (We don't have access to UTAC, I don't think.) Basically we assume the next time "the big one" happens, we'll show up and ought to have the frequencies programmed in that they tell us to use, but we don't know what those are and we don't really expect any coordination to work very well. Radio protocol is shit even (especially?) by the pros, and between range and availability concerns we're not really convinced. I'm really the only one who knows how to use it, and maybe a few of the emergency management wonks who are planning to make a living in public safety. With the main radio being in the ambulance, coordination with folks in the field is difficult and likely to happen on agency frequencies. The state gave us one or two VHF handheld radios with most of the same frequencies, but that doesn't really help. Mostly we use our VHF gear for calling the hospitals and I sometimes put up the NOAA weather or medic dispatch frequency, but that's just me.

It sounds like what they're proposing is sort of uber-trunking-system, which would be pretty cool if it actually worked - basically you mostly live on your agency's and other commonly used talkgroups like today's programmed frequencies, but then when you need to, just type in some nationwide ID and everyone's radio can talk to everyone else's.

Simple enough, right? The problem is:
- The existing tech is mostly proprietary.
- It doesn't scale to this level.
- Trunking radio has a nasty fallback mode when the coordinator(name?) fails - basically the radios revert to normal analog operation. That's obviously not acceptable for any nationwide effort, so it really can't fail. But it can't be like a cellphone base station either, where it turns into a brick if the base is down.
- Public safety radios are hilariously expensive - think >$800 per (basic!) handheld, far more for a mobile or base station, and then labor for programming and setup - so if you want people to actually switch you're gonna need to drop a lot of cash. If we were to upgrade everyone's radio this year it would cost more than our entire annual expenditures on *everything else*. (Mind you, they are worth the money - they are virtually indestructible and it's not something you want to fail at a bad time.)

I also don't like how they play up the data aspect. Data is occasionally useful for computer-aided dispatch purposes (which we have, technically, because our dispatcher isn't using pen and paper - except they do, mostly) but it's overhyped. Big cities make more effective use, where multiple units can be coordinated more automatically than with voice, but even there that's more about e