Chief Russell: FirstNet Needed to Protect 4.9 GHz for Public Safety

By James Careless

Chief Russell believes 4.9 GHz should be protected for public safety with a centralized model under the FirstNet Authority while protecting the current incumbents. While this may appear to be a conflicting ideology with one held by many in the state of Kansas, Chief Russell understands why public safety needs this spectrum and how this approach will support public safety’s use of this vital spectrum.

Chad Russell is Fire Chief at Andover Fire & Rescue in Andover, Kansas, and President of the Kansas State Association of Fire Chiefs. Like many in Kansas, he believes in ‘Home Rule’. “That means that we really don’t want people in the state capitol or the national capitol telling us how to run business here in our small towns,” said Chief Russell. “That’s the way we really feel across the state of Kansas.”

At the same time, Chief Russell knows what can happen when businesses can get away with putting their profit priorities first. He points to Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and fire trucks to prove his point. 

“The CAD industry works so that the day you put the CAD you’ve bought into service, it starts its obsolescence journey, and before too long it’s obsolete,” Chief Russell said. “Because the CAD you bought is proprietary, they completely have you beholden to them. The only way to fix it is to spend millions of dollars and buy another system or spend millions of dollars and upgrade to their new system.”

“Another example is fire trucks. The fire truck’s parts are built by many manufacturers, but the fire truck manufacturer — the one that puts it all together — may buy the part and they put their sticker on it,” said Chief Russell. “Now I may have to buy the part from them. I can’t go to where it was actually made and buy it from the direct person. I have to buy it through the fire truck manufacturer. It slows down the delivery and it increases costs.”

Having experienced firsthand what happens when businesses can dictate terms to public safety, Chief Russell doesn’t want to see the 4.9 GHz band left vulnerable to them by not protecting it through a nationwide non-business authority such as the FirstNet Authority. “This whole 4.9 spectrum feels just like that,” Chief Russell said. “We allow commercial interests to take over part of this spectrum, then we are going to be beholden to them, and the only way that we move forward is to spend millions of dollars to buy their new products.”

“Now I am a firm believer in capitalism myself, but the truth is that we need a centralized 4.9 GHz governance model (FirstNet Authority) to protect incumbent and future public safety users,” he explained. “And the only way to guarantee that is by protecting this spectrum and not selling it off to the highest bidder or letting it languish in the mire of its current state of stagnancy. Without centralized governance, 4.9 GHz will be out of reach for the majority of American public safety users. I do not have hundreds of millions of dollars to build an infrastructure, and I don’t have more millions to fight off large corporations to try to protect my spectrum when there’s an interference problem. These are the reasons why I believe that it’s important to protect this spectrum from commercial business interests and have 4.9 GHz under a proven governance model through the FirstNet Authority. All while having the FirstNet Authority set in stone, the protecting of the incumbent users and current licensees.”

Asked why he wants FirstNet to be in charge, Chief Russell replied, “The reality is that the FirstNet Authority governance model is working. We had a tornado in my local jurisdiction a couple of years ago, and within two hours we had a FirstNet satellite truck setting up in the parking lot with our communications bus.”

FirstNet is also a leader in the deployment of 5G technology, which Chief Russell says will revolutionize and improve public safety communications in America. “5G gives us faster data, low latency, and higher capacity,” he said. “The way I explain FirstNet 5G to fire chiefs is that it’s like establishing a brand new 12-inch water main and there’s no other users: You have exclusive access to it. For the law enforcement folks out there, it’s like getting into a ‘I need it, and I need it right now!’ type of response and you have the capacity of a force multiplier of resources to get it done in real time.”

At the same time, 5G technology is new and still under development, which is why it is important to keep public safety’s options for innovation open on the 4.9 GHz band. “When you boil it all down, we really don’t know yet, what we don’t know,” said Chief Russell. “I don’t know what technological capabilities are going to exist in three years and certainly not in five years, but I do know that we need to protect this 4.9 GHz spectrum for that exact reason. We don’t know what’s coming but we know we’re going to need a lot of data and be able to move a lot of data. 5G gets that done, and if we marry FirstNet with the 4.9 spectrum, that’s the best of both worlds.”

“The driving forces behind the FirstNet Authority are public safety leaders looking out for public safety leaders,” Chief Russell said. “And if we move the 4.9 GHz spectrum away from allocating it to the FirstNet Authority and fracture it out to business interests, I believe that what is going to happen, is that we will see a continuation of fractured, disparate networks especially for those who cannot pay the enormous freight for customization at every turn of the wheel. Essentially, a whole segment of those who need it most, will be cut out of the network equation. That’s why 4.9 GHz needs to be protected by being allocated to the FirstNet Authority’s public safety oversight model, so that public safety is put first, as a true philosophy for mission critical standards. This will give public safety the voice it needs and decision-making capability on the jurisdictional level, as to who the users are, giving them the very definition of local control.”

Chief Russell is very passionate about public safety and protecting the citizens he serves in Kansas. The way he sees it, the bottom line is this: “Together we can do this, we can do it the right way for public safety, and we can do it by design for the benefit of all of public safety.”