Public safety communications depend on reliability, predictability, and resilience. For decades, the lower 900 MHz band (902–928 MHz) has quietly served as a foundational layer for life-safety systems across the United States. According to one filing this band supports billions of unlicensed Part 15 devices—panic buttons, fire alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, emergency vehicle alerting systems, traffic signal preemption, gunshot detection sensors, SCBAs, man-down systems, wildfire detection, and many other mission-critical tools relied upon daily by first responders.
NextNav’s petition to fundamentally repurpose this band for a high-power 5G terrestrial positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) network represents a direct threat to that ecosystem. In a November 13, 2025, joint filing, the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), APCO International, and the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) stated that, “We believe NextNav’s proposed PNT solutions could negatively affect existing incumbent operations essential to the preservation of life and safety.” They went on to say, “Evidence from recent reports and studies, such as the engineering review submitted into the record by Pericle Communications, highlights potential risks of NextNav’s proposal to critical life safety systems.” This position is supported by over 40 FCC filings in opposition to the NextNav plan. (The links to these are below.)
For those of us who have been around for several decades working to protect public safety spectrum and technology, we recall the mess that was created with interference from Nextel. Their network created such destructive interference to public safety systems that public safety spectrum had to be re-banded (reorganized) at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Much of that had to be paid by Nextel, but there were also millions of dollars spent nationally by state and local governments to do research, fight for funding (which didn’t always cover all the costs), and then the hours of labor and management by government agencies—money they didn’t have.
From a first responder’s standpoint, the importance of this band is straightforward: it supports automatic, always-on systems that function independently of cellular subscriptions, user intervention, or centralized network control. When a fire alarm trips, a man-down sensor is activated, a panic button is pressed, a flood sensor activates, or any of the systems cited above trigger, there is no tolerance for intermittent interference, degraded sensitivity, or forced shutdowns.
Independent engineering analysis conducted by Pericle Communications demonstrates that this is not a simple case of spectrum sharing—it is a fundamental mismatch of network topologies. Low-power, narrowband, short-range devices cannot coexist with high-power, broadband, continuously transmitting 5G base stations operating in adjacent or overlapping spectrum.
Their study shows that even under conservative assumptions, receiver sensitivity for critical public safety devices would be degraded by 27 dB to nearly 90 dB, depending on bandwidth. In practical terms, this means a panic button, carbon monoxide detector, or fire alarm would require a signal strength stronger than is physically possible to function correctly.
Real-World Consequences for First Responders
The implications are not theoretical. Modeling and Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that interference and blocking would occur between 40 percent and more than 90 percent of the time, depending on distance from a NextNav site and device type. NextNav asserts that coexistence is achievable (exactly what Nextel tried to convince us of), yet the technical record tells a different story.
From a public safety perspective, this is unworkable, placing people’s lives in danger—all for a system that is not needed. Part of the reality is that NextNav has been pushing this idea for over a decade. In technology terms, that is a lifetime. Technology has changed, and the solutions built into current cell phones that can address this get better year by year and don’t require massive network upgrades.
Why?
Let’s understand that this is about one thing: money. NextNav is a public company (Nasdaq: NN) with investors who have spent hundreds of millions—if not billions—on a bad idea. It was bad ten years ago, and it is bad today. NextNav has a fiduciary responsibility to earn money for its stockholders. They will do what they need to do to meet that responsibility, and that does not benefit public safety. A basic fact is that their first and foremost responsibility is not to public safety—it is to their investors.
Conclusion:
Public safety should not be collateral damage to corporate profit for technology that is not needed. This is a cancer. It starts as one small deployment causing interference, then proliferates itself across devices and networks, eventually requiring the expenditure of time, money, and effort by public safety. Let’s not make this the next re-banding problem.
The technical record is clear: NextNav’s proposal would cause widespread harmful interference, disable critical public safety systems, and introduce unacceptable risk into emergency response environments. As first responders, we rely on systems that work silently, continuously, and without negotiation with a commercial network.
Public safety spectrum exists to protect lives—not to serve as an experimental proving ground for incompatible technologies.
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