Public Safety Advocate: FirstNet (Built with AT&T) Announces More Communications Tools

At IWCE 2022, FirstNet announced a new, significant upgrade to FirstNet (Built with AT&T) that prompted me to write about communications tools for first responders.

One of these tools is actually an upgrade to the network that many of us have been expecting for a long time. This network enhancement makes it possible to send Push-To-Talk (PTT) voice, data, and video to multiple devices simultaneously (multicasting). The most significant effect I see with multicasting videos is that this activity consumes much more bandwidth than PTT.  Multicast, or eMBS, is important because it not only supports one-to-many broadcasts over the network, it adds yet another attribute which, until now, only Land Mobile Radio (LMR) could provide. 

Those of us who “grew up” with LMR have taken one-to-many communications for granted. Police, fire, and EMS units and personnel can be dispatched simultaneously with a single transmission from the Emergency Communications Center (ECC) or dispatch center using LMR. In major metro areas where a city is divided into districts, each district might be on its own LMR channel or, in a trunked system, the district will have a group that is set up to include everyone within that district. Most metro areas have additional LMR channels for citywide communications. From its beginning, LMR has been able to reach groups or an entire city with a single broadcast. 

Meanwhile, the majority of the traffic on cellular systems has been one-to-one because this is what these networks were designed for. Text messages can be sent to multiple recipients but each text message is sent sequentially to each person. This is not multicasting. 

eMBS adds this one-to-many capability to FirstNet. So far, I have not been able to obtain enough information to determine if the one-to-many feature can be used for a district broadcast. If so, would the message have to be sent to specific cell sites, or will it be sent nationwide? I suspect it will be possible to use one-to-many in different areas including districts, citywide, countywide, and perhaps statewide, but so far, I have not been able to verify that eMBS will be this flexible. No matter, that multicast is finally available on FirstNet is very good news for first responders.

Once I have information on exactly how multicast can be sliced and diced, I will include it in a future Advocate. If it can be sent to specific cell sites, it could also be used to broadcast and stream video to an entire stadium full of people and this might result in a reduction of the data capacity needed during a sporting event or concert. 

Regardless, multicast will become yet another valuable tool and a welcome addition to the FirstNet network.

The only remaining question is when, exactly, will eMBS become available to public-safety agencies using FirstNet? 

Meanwhile, the majority of the traffic on cellular systems has been one-to-one because this is what these networks were designed for. Text messages can be sent to multiple recipients but each text message is sent sequentially to each person. This is not multicasting. 

eMBS adds this one-to-many capability to FirstNet. So far, I have not been able to obtain enough information to determine if the one-to-many feature can be used for a district broadcast. If so, would the message have to be sent to specific cell sites, or will it be sent nationwide? I suspect it will be possible to use one-to-many in different areas including districts, citywide, countywide, and perhaps statewide but so far, I have not been able to verify that eMBS will be this flexible. No matter, that multicast is finally available on FirstNet is very good news for first responders.

Once I have information on exactly how multicast can be sliced and diced, I will include it in a future Advocate. If it can be sent to specific cell sites, it could also be used to broadcast and stream video to an entire stadium full of people and this might result in a reduction of the data capacity needed during a sporting event or concert. 

Regardless, multicast will become yet another valuable tool and a welcome addition to the FirstNet network.

The only remaining question is when, exactly, will eMBS become available to public-safety agencies using FirstNet?

In a keynote address at IWCE 2022, FirstNet (Built with AT&T) suggested that more tools would soon be available.  Most of these new offerings have to do with push-to-talk including PTT that meets the 3GPP standard for Mission-Critical Push-To-Talk (MCPT PTT) products available on FirstNet. One of these new features will be 3GPP-compliant PTT on iOS devices. This will be an important addition since many FirstNet agencies and users have chosen an iPhone for their FirstNet communications. 

Next up is “FirstNet Rapid Response,” which appears to be a joint product from FirstNet and Motorola. The features or functions in this new offering have not been provided in any detail that I have been able to find so to provide readers with exactly what was said at IWCE 2022, I am including a portion of an article written by Donny Jackson in Urgent Communications. This article was based on an interview he had with Scott Agnew, AT&T Assistant Vice President, FirstNet Solutions, FirstNet Built with AT&T, last week. I am including the descriptive text because I want readers to read exactly what was said. Perhaps this might help FirstNet users determine if they will switch from their existing FirstNet-Certified PTT application to what is described below:

“It [FirstNet Rapid Response] is definitely a premium solution,” Agnew said. “It supports more devices, has more features, is more mature, and carries a premium in the marketplace.

“So, you have a low-cost, very efficient [solution in FirstNet PTT] versus a premium solution that has a lot more features [FirstNet Rapid Response]—and, of course, interoperability with Motorola’s Critical Connect, which we know is very important.”

FirstNet Rapid Response currently is provided as a hosted solution—“it’s network-interfaced, just to be clear,” Agnew said—and is available at a list price between $2 per month for the standard service to $15 per month the advanced service for the first year. After the first 12 months, the rates for FirstNet Rapid Response increase to $12 per month for the standard service and $27.50 per month for the advanced service, according to information posted on the www.firstnet.com website.

Currently a network-interfaced solution, FirstNet Rapid Response from Motorola Solutions is able to provide quality-of-service characteristics that some over-the-top MCPTT offerings cannot achieve, but it is not integrated with the FirstNet system as the FirstNet PTT offering from Samsung, Agnew said. Future iterations of FirstNet Rapid Response are expected to include greater network integration as the offering evolves, he said.

In contrast, FirstNet PTT powered by Samsung is fully network-integrated and “is specifically designed … for public safety—the interface is very clean and very easy to use,” Agnew said. FirstNet PTT is being positioned as “a lot less expensive” than FirstNet Rapid Response, he said.

Through June, FirstNet PTT is being offered at no monthly cost for a year “just to get users adopted and familiar with it,” Agnew said. The normal cost for FirstNet PTT is $10 per month, he said.

AT&T’s interoperability goal is to allow FirstNet PTT users to talk with FirstNet Rapid Response users with no additional infrastructure, but that is not possible today, Agnew said. In fact, there currently is no way for FirstNet PTT users to talk with FirstNet Rapid Response users, even via one of the many gateway solutions that are commercially available today, he said.”

To begin with, I agree with FirstNet’s statement that off-network communications (simplex) is not currently available. However, they tell us they are looking at options. ProSe is today’s off-network 3GPP and, as I have said many times, two people can yell at each other farther than ProSe will talk. I am not optimistic that there will be a broadband solution for off-network communications using either LTE or 5G. Even if, and this is a big if, High Power User Equipment (HPUE) devices become available in a form factor similar to handheld devices, they will continue to operate at a maximum power of 1.25 watts (as opposed to standard cellular devices that are limited to 0.25 watts). 

Other issues that would have to be addressed would probably require either a second receiver or a separate transmitter in the device. If that is the case, given the relatively small worldwide market size for off-network communications, I believe such devices would be cost prohibitive. It appears to me that the only reason to promise off-network LTE or 5G is that some non-public-safety vendors still believe land mobile radio systems will disappear if and when off-network solutions that meet the needs of public safety come on the market. I remain a skeptic. 

I included all of the “Rapid Response” part of the Urgent article because I want to include a few comments about it as well. However, I will not comment on the pricing.

I want to point out that the “Rapid Response” PTT solution appears to be an over-the-top application, while Samsung 3GPP PTT services, also offered by FirstNet, are inside the FirstNet network where, according the 3GPP, they belong. It looks to me like the new Rapid Response PTT solution, referred to as “Premium,” will be competing with at least five other over-the-top PTT solutions that have been available on FirstNet for a few years and already have large installed users bases. 

It is not clear but it appears that this new Rapid Response offering is designed to convince users of existing PTT solutions to abandon them and come over to this new, combined offering. As I have said before, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to convince agencies to switch from their existing PTT systems. In many cases, their current PTT includes really good integration with FirstNet and most land mobile radio systems. 

The direction FirstNet (AT&T) is taking is becoming clearer now that it has made the announcements and comments above, so existing FirstNet users will be able to contrast and compare all Certified options’ per-unit monthly pricing and PTT capabilities. 

As a cost comparison, the GSA price for ESChat, which is one of the top PTT applications on FirstNet, is $4.57 per user and includes:

• Secure, end-to-end encryption 
• Multimedia messaging
• Live real-time location and mapping

Additionally, I’m not sure of exactly what is included in the “Rapid Response” premium package. I have to wonder how close it is to “Unified PTT” that I have been writing about. Unified PTT essentially means any FirstNet or LMR user that has been linked to FirstNet can use PTT to any other first responder or agency.  It goes back to what I have been writing about for years: Unified PTT services serving all public-safety agencies nationwide on FirstNet and, in many cases, fully integrated with LMR PTT systems. The questions each agency will have to answer going forward are:

• Do I stay with my current FirstNet-Certified PTT provider or move to what FirstNet is now offering?
• If we made the switch, can we still have our LMR system integrated into the FirstNet PTT solution using one of the current interfaces available today?
• What is the cost difference, per unit, per month between my existing PTT supplier and the new FirstNet offering? Does the delta in the cost provide my agency with some features and functions we cannot have using another PTT-Certified application?

While I was not born in, nor have I ever lived in Missouri, I often plagiarize its state nickname: “The Show-Me State! I have found over the years that statements about what the future holds for public safety while not defining how far into the future you mean, can sometimes come back to bite you! 

I, for one, am willing to wait and see what is included in “Rapid Response” and when it will be available in its entirety to assist the public-safety community that really needs Unified PTT services as soon as possible. 

Winding Down

Those who know me and/or read the Advocate know I have devoted the past fourteen-plus years to helping in any way I could to first convince Congress, the FCC, and the Executive Branch to create what is now FirstNet. Since then, I have been dedicated to the operation of the FirstNet network and poking and prodding when I thought the FirstNet user community needed the vendor community to respond more quickly and provide more communication tools. 

Hindsight is 20-20 they say, and if that is true, all of us missed what should have been obvious from the beginning. Building a Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network was a huge step and it has been more successful than many would have guessed. With the public/private partnership between the FirstNet Authority and FirstNet (Built with AT&T), each was free to hire or bring onboard the best and brightest people, many from within the public-safety community. For its part, AT&T has more than stepped up and made FirstNet a success. Those within AT&T who are charged with continually improving FirstNet strive to do so as quickly as possible. 

Yet, from the outside, it appears what we all missed after the creation of FirstNet was to make sure push-to-talk would be the very first application to work across the entire network. Some thought the right way to proceed was to ask the 3GPP standards body to do something it has never done before: Develop a set of standards for push-to-talk. The 3GPP’s focus has always been on network innovation, and PTT was certainly a departure from networks. It took too long to develop the 3GPP standard to where vendors would work with it, and it took the vendors longer than they thought to implement it. Meanwhile, a number of good, solid, PTT applications were submitted to FirstNet (Built with AT&T) and agencies started using them. 

Now there is a 3GPP PTT standard. However, there is also a huge installed base of public-safety users who, instead of waiting for 3GPP, moved on with one of a variety of PTT solutions and are happy with their choice. The only thing still missing is that every agency using PTT over FirstNet cannot talk to every other agency using PTT over FirstNet. This is true even if both agencies are using a certified PTT application over FirstNet. Until there is Unified PTT, choosing from among so many PTT options separates users into smaller PTT communications groups. Not even an LMR system that has been integrated with a FirstNet-Certified PTT application can communicate with all other users of PTT over FirstNet. 

While all types of vendors examining this issue concede it will be a long time before there will be a true Unified PTT system, the first-responder community needs ubiquitous PTT NOW. Unfortunately, I am hearing a chorus of “Real Soon Now” and we all know there is no time frame for RSN. If only a few vendors would agree to work with each other we could have truly Unified PTT by the end of this year, of that I am convinced. 

Until next week…

Andrew M. Seybold 
©2022, Andrew Seybold, Inc.