A selection of witnesses representing various interests testified before a U.S. Senate committee last Wednesday on the best way to construct a nationwide wireless network for public safety agencies. The Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who has introduced legislation to directly assign the D Block spectrum directly to public safety, a plan that would override existing legislation requiring the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to auction the spectrum to a commercial company. The witnesses included Raymond Kelly, police commissioner of New York City, Jack Markell, governor of Delaware, Al Gillespie, chief of the North Las Vegas fire department, and Joe Hanna, former president of APCO and now a consultant. Several witnesses invoked the advanced wireless technology available to teenagers, and lamented that police officers and firefighters don’t have the same capabilities.
Kelly told the committee that the nation’s public safety communications systems “are fast becoming obsolete.” He explained the initiatives that New York City has undertaken, including establishing a real-time crime center and a soon-to-be-launched facial recognition system that works in real time at crime scenes. Drawing from the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, he said that, “We know from past experience that we can’t depend on (wireless) systems run by the private sector,” because they are subject to failure in a crisis. He concluded his testimony by asking Congress to “allocate the D Block directly to public safety, and to ensure funding for this vital resource.”
Markell said the state of Delaware has worked towards 800 MHz interoperability ever since Sept. 11th, and has become one of the first states to achieve that goal. However, the network doesn’t support broadband data. He said that allocating the D Block to public safety would be “an unparalleled opportunity” to develop a nationwide broadband network for public safety. Without the D Block, “State and local governments will again be forced to maintain multiple communications networks to ensure the brave men and women who protect the public and respond to emergencies can talk to each other.” He said a network operated by commercial companies “will simply not work,” and cited roaming and priority access and major issues. He also said excessive demand during disasters would block public safety transmissions on a commercial network, and called that “unacceptable.”
Chief Gillespie noted that the nation’s 55,000 public safety agencies are operating in six or more spectrum bands, making interoperability both difficult and expensive. He said assigning the D Block to public safety would provide sufficient capacity, put public safety in charge of the network, and allow the network design to be mission critical. He said an auction of spectrum in other bands could raise the necessary $11 billion for both initial construction and continuing maintenance of a public safety wireless network.
Hanna identified himself as president of Directions Inc., a consulting firm he founded after retiring as a comm center director in Texas. However, he did not say that he has been a paid consultant for T-Mobile, or that he’s worked with the cellular carrier lobbying group Connect Public Safety, which opposes the direct allocation of the D Block to public safety. He agreed that public safety should have a nationwide network, and called it “inexcusable” that it’s taken so long to achieve that goal.
Hanna used two examples of the disparity between commercial and public safety communications. First, he said that during a house tour, his real estate agent can use a laptop computer to view photos of the interior, tax records, surveys and plats, and a list of comparable values in the neighborhood. But, he said, “A firefighter at a burning building cannot pull up a floor plan to aid in a search and rescue or identify known hazardous conditions inside the building.” Actually, many fire departments do have this capability.
Next, Hanna said that, “A pedophile in a park can sit on a bench with a smart phone, take photographs of vulnerable children, and then instantly send his pictures to other pedophiles around the world.” But he claimed that a police officer who responded to that park to investigate a suspicious person, “cannot upload or download a photograph or scanned fingerprint of that person to a local, state or national database to help determine if this subject is indeed a known threat to the community.” Again, many agencies do have the capability to download photos, and some also have fingerprint search capabilities. Hanna did not mention the almost universal capability to search databases by name.
But while agreeing with the need, Hanna said he doesn’t believe that first responders “need be the licensees of all the spectrum they may need to use.” He agrees with the National Broadband Plan, whose “cornerstone” is a proposal to use 10 MHz of spectrum allocated by Congress to public safety back in 1997, and which would be “more than adequate” for day-to-day use. Hanna said he agrees with a Senate bill to provide “flexible use” of 700 MHz spectrum, which public safety agencies now oppose.
Download (pdf) and read the witnesses’ prepared testimony here.
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