House Subcommittee Schedules FirstNet Hearing For Next Week

A House subcommittee next week will conduct a hearing examining some of the issues surrounding the FirstNet “opt-in/opt-out” decisions that most governors must make by Dec. 28, according to an announcement released today.

A House subcommittee next week will conduct a hearing examining some of the issues surrounding the FirstNet “opt-in/opt-out” decisions that most governors must make by Dec. 28, according to an announcement released today.

The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology—a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee—will conduct the hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 10:15 a.m. Wednesday. The hearing “examine the latest developments in the deployment of FirstNet, the first nationwide, interoperable broadband public safety network,” with the focus being “the status of states opting in or out of the FirstNet Network,” according to a subcommittee press release.

“Nationwide interoperability for our first responders has been a long time coming, and it’s critical—for their sake and the public’s—that we get this right,” subcommittee chairwoman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in a prepared statement. “As next week’s hearing demonstrates, we are committed to monitoring FirstNet’s progress to ensure it brings modern communications capabilities to the brave men and women who keep us safe. It’s vital that we deliver on a system that our firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and all those on the frontlines of public safety can rely on,”

No witness list had been posted for the hearing as of the publication of this article.