Interview
The American way:
FirstNet’s first year
Philip Mason talks to acting CEO of FirstNet Ed Parkinson about how the
network has changed the critical communications market, and how first-responders
are likely to embrace 5G
18
www.criticalcomms.com April 2019
CCT: Nearly a year after the roll-out of FirstNet,
how many first-responders are using it?
EP: It’s now being used across public safety in the United
States, simply as a natural progression to what they’d already
been doing. If you ask anyone in the emergency services,
they’ll tell you that they’ve been using broadband for years –
albeit not necessarily in a mission critical context – and that’s
clearly continuing now.
Obviously, the differentiator with FirstNet is that it’s
dedicated to public safety, with priority and pre-emption
built-in. We have a lot of features which no one else can offer.
CCT: What have been the specific use-cases,
prior to the eventual roll-out of mission-critical
push-to-talk?
EP: A primary use-case has been to improve situational
awareness in relation to certain events, something which,
again, is linked to the feel which first-responders already have
for the technology.
A great example of that was at the Houston rodeo – which
is absolutely massive – where there were reports of a lost child.
If you think of how that would have been handled back in
the day, an upset mother would come to an officer and try
to give a description. Today, by contrast, if you’re a parent,
you’re always taking photos of your kids. That’s precisely
what happened at the Houston Rodeo, and we were able to
circulate the picture securely on FirstNet devices, and the
child was found 20 minutes later.
CCT: Has the use of FirstNet been incorporated
into business-as-usual operations, or is it just
larger events?
EP: We’ve got just over 5,250 agencies using more than
425,000 connections on the network, and what you’d see if
you went around to each of their respective agencies is that
they’re all using it in different ways. The LAPD have their
own needs as distinct from others, which will be different
again from a fire department in Montana.
For daily operations, FirstNet is helping public safety
connect and seamlessly communicate across various agencies
and public safety disciplines. In Utah, the City of Orem has
its police, fire and EMS connected to the network and it is
helping them share information in real time, which improves
situational awareness across the board. They even put FirstNet
to the test during the city’s annual festival; as networks became
congested, public safety could still connect with FirstNet.
Another thing which we were able to roll out was additional
assets to improve network capacity – AT&T has 72 of these,
which are specific to band 14 deployment. That allows for a
certain type of capacity that you otherwise wouldn’t have. We
were flying – blowing away AT&T’s commercial network, which
in turn was blowing away everyone else. These assets have been
used for large planned events like the Boston Marathon and in
the aftermath of disasters like in response to Hurricane Michael
when other infrastructure was damaged.
CCT: At Critical Communications Europe, you
suggested that – via projects such as FirstNet –
the private communications market is starting to
be increasingly influenced by the requirements of
public safety. Could you elaborate on that?
EP: I always talk about the holistic nature of public safety
comms, but at the same time it’s only one part of the pie in
terms of verticals which are relevant to the public sector and/or
mission-critical. You also need to include things like education,
healthcare, smart cities and utilities, with the latter in particular
potentially benefiting from access to priority and pre-emption.
With that in mind, we’re definitely seeing opportunities for
MNOs to start to work in these – previously quite disparate –
areas of the market, something which is likely to be growing
all the time. For example, for a high-pressure emergency like
a school shooting. I’m sure if you’re a school you’ll want to
connect with public safety as quickly as you can, so imagine if
you could integrate a public high school security network into a
local police enforcement system.
Going back to the priority and pre-emption piece, it’s difficult
These other operators didn’t offer
priority and pre-emption before we
came along. Apple and Samsung weren’t
offering public-safety-specific
devices until we made them viable
/www.criticalcomms.com