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:25 years

[dgatwood]

By any sane standards, this is a complete waste of money. What works best for first responders? Point-to-point radio communications. Walkie talkies. All these systems didn't work because the systems were incompatible, and the reason they didn't all use the same system was that none of the systems were significantly better than any others, and each organization bought its radios on separate contracts from separate companies at different times, and short of a major emergency, there was no real reason to replace all of those radios with new ones just for a small increase in compatibility.

Adding infrastructure just creates new points of failure, and when things go seriously wrong, the infrastructure will be nonfunctional, at which point everybody will go back to those incompatible radios, because they work by themselves, without any outside support. Short of AT&T designing a true mesh network for independent, moving radios, this is just a parallel cellular network, with all the problems that a cellular network has, only with lower usage and less financial incentive to expand the infrastructure and keep it up-to-date. And remember that those radios, despite incompatibility issues, mostly worked, whereas on 9/11, the cell network was DOA. Now imagine a world where they tried to use a parallel cellular network just for them, that (unlike the public cell network) never got regular load testing except during actual emergencies.

My advice? Follow the money, figure out which politicians were bribed in exchange for funding this giant boondoggle, then vow to never elect any of them again. Rinse and repeat until politicians are clean again.