New American Foundation Pushes Public Safety Spectrum Reform
Emergency communications need “fundamental” reform, the New America Foundation said Thurs., urging a shift in focus from local to national control. A national system exploiting commercial networks as appropriate would be cheaper and more effective than today’s, the report said.
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“We throw a lot of money at trying to make incremental changes, trying to do things that maybe this system was not designed to do,” study author Jon Peha, a Carnegie Mellon U. prof., said: “Incremental changes sometimes are good, but they're going to have limited impact, in part because we're talking about some problems that are really rooted in the DNA of the public safety communications systems.”
The U.S. cannot leave it up to tens of thousands of local safety systems to decide how to communicate, Peha said: “This is not how we design a complex system, especially a system that is going to be used to make life or death decisions.”
The U.S. must drop the historic assumption that only govt. infrastructure can serve public safety and that public safety cannot share spectrum, he said: “That was true with old technology but technology has changed… You can get just as far with a lot less spectrum.”
Public safety needs to partner with carriers, the paper said, citing as possibilities a still-to-be-unveiled Verizon Wireless proposal to manage 12 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum for the use of public safety and the Cyren Call plan, which seeks 30 MHz of spectrum for a broadband network the firm would operate on behalf of public safety.
Cellular companies offer first responders another option, the report said: “Multiple networks are already operating in much (but not all) of the country, and competition between these carriers drives costs down and quality up.” Existing systems may not offer the needed reliability, but “perhaps this would change if carriers were encouraged to bid for public safety business,” the paper said.
Any solution to public safety spectrum needs is going to be complex, Cyren Call CEO Morgan O'Brien said on a panel the foundation held on the paper, noting that safety officials won’t trust systems they don’t control. “The spectrum we propose is held by public safety through a public safety broadband trust,” O'Brien said: “It’s held by public safety on day one after the proposal is adopted. It’s held by public safety 10 years later.”
Policymakers will find a solution, said David Aylward, dir. of the COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance. “Emergency response has historically in this country been local, very local. The idea for the FCC to hand out licenses town-by- town was a perfectly natural one,” he said: “There’s a building unanimity about things to be done.”