Challenges Seen in Early Deployment of Public Safety Network
Funding, jurisdiction and governance issues and state and local regulations are among the challenges of early deployment of regional 700 MHz public safety networks, state and local public safety officials told us. Many jurisdictions that received the initial 22 early deployment waivers granted by the FCC are proceeding on their own, initiating procurements, negotiating and implementing interoperability plans and participating in certification and compliance testing protocols, they said.
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Funding is an issue even for jurisdictions that have received stimulus grants, said Bill Schrier, chief technology officer of city of Seattle. Seattle’s regional group is preparing Land Mobile Radio (LMR) and LTE roadmap for the network, he said. A big part of the cost comes from replacing devices and build new cell sites, he said. The city, which didn’t receive federal grants for public safety network, has a $20 million funding gap, he said. The core of the network would be built by a single vendor but the city will be seeking competitive procurement, he said. Maintenance and sustainability of the network would be an issue, said Roger Quayle, CTO with IPWireless, which represents multiple early deployment jurisdictions. Meanwhile, public safety consists of many different agencies even within the same jurisdiction, Schrier said. A governance and administrative structure for the deployment of the network is needed to ensure interoperability, he said.
To help lower cost and improve collaboration among different jurisdictions, state and local officials are considering multi-jurisdiction planning. Texas, which picked Motorola to deploy the network in Harries County, considers multi-state planning and even multi-state procurement, said Mike Simpson, the state’s public safety communications interoperability coordinator and assistant director with the state’s Department of Public Safety. There’s the potential for sharing resources and for regional governance, he said. Seattle is considering multi-county collaboration, Schrier said. Any network that would be built in Seattle could be extended to other parts of the state, he said. Multi-city and/or multi-state collaboration is possible but it all depends on the specific communications needs, said Chuck Dowd, deputy chief of New York City Police Department.
Dowd emphasized the importance of closely coordinating with secondary responders like utilities. The network needs to allow these secondary responders to communicate with first responders though that traffic will be lower priority, he said. Secondary responders could fund a portion of the network, Schrier said. Many stimulus projects are subject to environmental regulations, he noted. Non-stimulus funded projects are still subject to different state and local regulations, he said.
An LTE public safety network needs good radio frequency planning and requires much higher backhaul bandwidth than land mobile radio, Quayle said. IPWireless’ testing has shown good throughput with no major product performance variations between vendors, he said. “Throughputs in LTE are fairly deterministic” assuming good frequency planning and optimization, he said. A big challenge for New York City’s planned network is coverage, said Dowd. For a densely populated city like New York, an LTE network needs to offer good coverage both outside and inside buildings, similar to the coverage traditional land-mobile radios offer, he said.