at this point to say what will become available and to whom,
but from my point of view, the market is going to take care of
that. At the moment what we’re seeing is public safety almost
as a kind of test-bed in terms of developing these different
kinds of enterprise solutions.
CCT: How do you anticipate the market changing
once 5G becomes available? Will network slicing
become part of the discussion, particularly in
relation to public safety?
EP: Who knows what will happen when we enter a 5G-type
environment, but it’s obviously an area of interest for us.
Again, we’re likely to see enterprise networks starting to
develop – whether that’s public-safety-related, or inside a
factory or an assembly plant – interconnecting with the
larger MNO.
From our point of view at FirstNet, as long as we’re at the
forefront of how the market is thinking – and we can take
advantage of market forces in a commercially beneficial way –
that’s only going to be advantageous to public safety.
Going back to the subject of how we’ve influenced things
from a commercial perspective, while I’m certainly not saying
FirstNet is the be all and end all, we have been able to drive
that innovation, as well as pushing the market to where we’ve
needed it to go. These other operators simply didn’t offer
priority and pre-emption before we came along. In the same
way, Apple and Samsung weren’t offering Band 14 public
safety-specific devices until we entered the market and made
them viable.
CCT: What discussions have there been around
5G, smart cities and so on among FirstNet users?
What are your plans?
EP: There’s currently a balancing act when it comes to 5G.
In the first instance, we obviously want to catch the wave as it
happens, but at the same time public safety doesn’t necessarily
know what they’re likely to want to use it for and the missioncritical
standards won’t be there yet. Zero latency’s pretty
cool, but do first-responders need it right now? I don’t know
anyone who has the answer to that.
From our point of view, we’ll be able to be 5G-ready in the
future because of our relationship with AT&T. But that still
Ed Parkinson CV
Edward Parkinson was named acting CEO in October 2018.
Previously he served as the director of external affairs,
where he was responsible for all external communications
and intergovernmental relations with local, state and
federal organisations. Before joining FirstNet, Parkinson
served for five years as a professional staff member for the
House Homeland Security Committee. During this period,
Parkinson’s primary responsibility was in the field of firstresponder
telecommunications. He also worked on issues
including national security, emergency preparedness and
cybersecurity. Previously, Parkinson served as an associate at
Kearsarge Global Advisors, an advocacy firm, and a research
analyst at McKenna, Long & Aldridge, an international law
firm specialising in public policy.
leaves the question of how far we invest in it in anticipation
of what it might provide. Eighteen billion dollars sounds like
a lot of money, but that’s spread out over the next 25 years,
and we clearly don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. In
a quarter of a century’s time, we’re going to be looking at what
6G might provide.
CCT: What conversations have you had with
public safety in relation to the next generation
of LTE?
EP: We have to engage with public safety, but also with
industry, again, understanding in which direction the
marketplace is moving. Users don’t really know the impact
which things like 5G – or AI, or Blockchain – are going to
have, but that’s OK because industry does. Let’s talk to them
and ask them to think about public safety applications.
CCT: To what degree has the roll-out of
FirstNet simplified the US critical
communications landscape in relation to things
such as interoperability?
EP: I think you could call it a complicated environment,
which in a way was the point of FirstNet.
We have a constitutionally driven federal style of
government, which gives an awful lot of power to the
individual states. At the same time, across the country, there
are also around 60,000 public safety agencies – all largely
autonomous – the majority of which have land mobile
networks which are not interoperable despite being provided
by the same one or two companies. We’ve been able to
leapfrog all of that and provide a single system, so that it
doesn’t matter where you are.
The fact that FirstNet is offering a new choice for public
safety, we have to offer a service which is competitive, and
that meets or exceeds the expectations of public safety. We
spent two years consulting with the states; we even went to
RFP, gathering information from the locals to explain to the
market that this is what they want.
You have to go to the users first, and that will continue
going forward. If I just went unilaterally to somewhere like
LA and told them “This is what you want”, I’d get laughed
out of the room, and rightly so.
April 2019 @CritCommsToday 19