Public Safety Advocate: FirstNet Authority Five-Year “Roadmap,” Devices at APCO
As promised, the FirstNet Authority has published its five-year reinvestment roadmap as approved by the board of directors some time ago. Official publication had been…
Public Safety Advocate
Public Safety Advocate: APCO Conference
As advertised last week, this week’s Advocate is late because I spent much of the week at the APCO Conference in Baltimore. Having been raised on the…
Public Safety Advocate: FCC Recognizes Wireless, FirstNet Priority, Santa Barbara
After a week of travel, it’s nice to be back in Phoenix but Santa Barbara still feels like my home and I enjoyed interacting with…
Public Safety Advocate: Public Safety Spectrum, Interoperability, and the FCC
This week’s column is late due to my travel commitments this week and there will be no Advocate next week since I will be in Santa Barbara,…
Public Safety Advocate: 3GPP, PSCR, T-Band, Multicast
3GPP, the standards body that created LTE, now seems to be focused on 5G with a few side trips back to LTE. Its Radio Access…
Public Safety Advocate: PSCR, More on PTT, Future Technologies
This week the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) organization under The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is holding its annual meeting to discuss…
Public Safety Advocate: FirstNet PTT Interoperability
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to find better, open-standard ways to bridge the gap between Land Mobile Radio (LMR) and FirstNet…
Public Safety Advocate: 5G Interloper, Ready for Public Safety?, Uplifting, More
By necessity, this week’s Advocate will begin at the beginning. During the FirstNet RFP process there were three bidders. As we all know, AT&T won the bid…
Public Safety Advocate: Quakes, States, Investments and Alliances
During the first full year of network availability, FirstNet has demonstrated how it increases first responders’ effectiveness in handling most disasters including wildfires, tornadoes, flooding,…
Public Safety Advocate: FirstNet Timing
The FirstNet contract as awarded to AT&T, now FirstNet (Built with AT&T), is a twenty-five-year agreement. The initial five years represent the time in which…
Public Safety Advocate: Past, Present, and Future
Though it represents much more than a single day, this is the week we honor D-Day and the far too many brave people who lost…
Public Safety Advocate: Month-End Miscellany
The first order of business this week is to give a shout out on behalf of all those who have given their lives for our…
Public Safety Advocate: The Next Big Thing (Again)
5G is coming! 5G is coming! Everywhere in the world, the cellular industry is pushing fifth-generation (5G) deployments even though not all 5G spectrum has…
Public Safety Advocate: Hurricanes and Other Disasters
Hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30, 2019, and a number of agencies and organizations are formulating their predictions about the potential severity of…
Public Safety Advocate: Feds, States in Rural Broadband Push
I recently saw a posting on Twitter from the governor of South Dakota announcing her state is requesting proposals to cover “all corners” of the…