700 D Block Network Won’t Fix Public Safety Communications Needs, DHS Official Says
A proposed national public safety broadband network using 700 MHz D-block spectrum will be helpful to first responders, but will only be a partial answer to their communications needs, Chris Essid, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s new Office of Emergency Communications said at the FCC Wednesday. Because of many unknowns, the D-block was not a big part of the agency’s national strategic plan, which it sent to Congress last year, he said as part of the Public Safety Bureau’s speaker series.
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“We're like everyone else, we're waiting to see what happens,” Essid said. “We support the need for wireless broadband for our first responders throughout the nation. It’s a fabulous capability. We think they should have the best.” Essid said many in the public don’t understand that public safety agencies won’t instantly move from their legacy systems. “We get questions all the time about, well, gosh if they're going to go and have this 700 MHz wireless broadband network why are doing all this other stuff in your national plan?” he said. “Won’t everyone just migrate over there like tomorrow?”
Public safety agencies are going to use their current systems through the “life cycle” of the equipment, which can run 10 or 15 more years, Essid said. “It’s going to be a migration,” he said. “You're going to have to go to that next generation technology and some areas are ready to go now. They've been champing at the bit to go. In some areas it’s going to be a while.”
Action on the D-block is expected to be a top wireless priority of the next FCC, agency and public safety sources say. The commission was at one time expected to approve an order establishing a D-block auction at its December meeting.
The office is starting to put the national plan in place, Essid said. “We've made a lot of progress but, there’s a lot to do.” The U.S. is making progress in coordinating public safety communications, but doing so is a massive job, he said. Essid said by DHS’s count there are 2.8 million public safety officials using communications on a daily basis, that includes more than one million firefighters at more than 30,000 departments, 840,000 EMS personnel and 836,000 law enforcement officers spread across some 27,000 agencies. Plus, federal agencies all have their own systems with 60,000 wireless communications users at just the Department of Interior.
“This is hard,” Essid said. “These folks all have different technologies and different frequency bands. The term herding cats does come to mind. … It’s more like herding tigers because people have spent a lot of money on the communications systems.”
There are no quick fixes for interoperable communications, Essid said. “We've got billions of dollars worth of investments out there that people are currently using,” he said. “We can’t just say everybody go to one frequency band. There’s not one frequency band that can hold all these folks. We can’t say everyone go to one technology. How much money would that cost?” Better coordination is critical, Essid said. The U.S. is making progress on that front, he said. Two years ago, only eight states had interoperability plans, but all do now, he said. Today, 25 states have an interoperable communications coordinator, compared to three when he held that job for Virginia, Essid said. “There are still gaps out there,” he said.