$7 Billion Disconnect: FirstNet Aims to Get First Responders Talking...

[902]

Originally Posted by RonBon

The best part about this is the Winchester bid out. Have been hoping to see at least Harris or EFJ build one public safety system in our area. Sad to say it looks like astro25 systems will be dominating this area of Virginia for the next ten years until they go bad. . Harris even has a corporate office of some sort right in the next county over and they couldn't even put a bid in... Washington, D.C. Public safety and the airports authority have the last of the project 16 systems "smartnet" in this region. Wonder if anyone else bid on them either. **Yup I called Smartzone project 16 prove me wrong**

Is anyone else getting into the tower business? 40,000!! Why not just use existing infrastructure as much as possible?

Any bets on completion years for this? 2023 is mine.

Those things fly together pretty quickly once the money's flowing. I'd say 2 - 3 years. Optimization is another thing. Some agencies just put it in stock and never tweak the system to their liking (or don't have time/or don't know how to without continually reaching for their wallets).

The prevailing thought in large systems construction today is to build things to a performance spec. The way a consultant explained this to me (when I flat out directed him to use existing towers in the buildout of a system my former committee and I conceptualized) is this: You present a number, like a delivered audio quality (DAQ) figure or an average coverage (95% of locations, 95% of the time) and then place the burden on the bidder to work costs and resources to meet projected performance metrics. The other face of the coin is usually that since the sites don't exist yet, they coordinate and license fictitious sites to create a peripheral signal contour around the jurisdiction. Then, you can move your sites to wherever you'd like within the area without added justification IF the interference contour of the actual sites conforms within the aggregate peripheral interference contour. His words: if you specify the sites, you accept all responsibility for the system's performance (as the designer, I went "Duhhh!" but the politicians didn't); if I throw out a number and the bidder picks the sites, then THEY take responsibility for the system's performance if it doesn't work as intended. The problem with that is a chicken-and-egg issue. You can't line up independent projects, like microwave connectivity, since you have no idea where things would go. Everything has to run concurrently and would exceed the span of control of a limited resource internal proponent (hence, more consultants... the name of the game in consulting is to create steady work for yourself and never quite finish...).

Communications is a bold new world today, much more than it was even 15 years ago. Back in the Galvin days, I looked at other stuff as junk. Now in the post-breakup era between solutions and mobility, other competitors are coming up very rapidly and have a better vision of the future. Yes, somewhere west of Chicago there is a very likely a big whiteboard with the strategy mapped out, between red systems and blue systems. There's probably a whiteboard in Virginia, too. And it's a posturing game to make sure it comes to fruition. But that leaves out the green, orange, and purple guys who at this point, really have their act together and have more cost-efficient and spectrum-efficient technologies.

I was ambushed at a conference several years ago by an aggressive salesman who tried to tell me what I needed to implement was VHF trunking because I had some VHF simulcast stuff already built out (never mind the project almost didn't go because it needed clear frequencies to work). He was bewildered when I told him I thought VHF was a mess, and that I wanted no part of it. He lost me when he told me he came to the conference across the country to meet with us and chose to miss a significant event one of his kids was having. I believe I told him we could have waited or met him on home turf and then called him an idiot for missing his kid's whatever. Oh well. They ended up building a large VHF system for someone else in the region and a 700/800 system for others, which tells me that it was choreographed well in advance. Had I known then what I know now, I would have waited a few months, put my frequencies together into pairs, and just put in a big turbo system independent of $2M controllers and monthly maintenance costs that could have been a FTE salary and be done with it.

Yeah, RonBon, it is disheartening that no one wanted to take the ball and run with it. There had to be something.

But that's all old-school now. The D-Block is a game changer, as big R&D money is going into infrastructure and subscriber devices. The original plan there was for the units to be affordable, but you know what happens when those two words: "Public Safety" are silk screened on a consumer device that has an extra gasket and a bit more plastic trim.

Sorry for my rambling rant. Obvious sore spot is obvious.

[jlanfn]

I normally try to keep my posts informational, but I will set that aside this time.

A couple of concerns I've had for several years about this nationwide public safety broadband network come to mind.

1. People (politicians mostly) have been touting it as the "be all end all" of interoperability, yet the system will not support any kind of mission critical voice communications for many years. I guess if data interoperability is all you need and you happen to be in a major urban area, it might be useful.
2. Due to the wide world of possible uses for this system, people have been proposing more and more users who need to be on the system, including utilities and second responders. It seems no one has taken a serious look at the capacity of the system to see whether it will be able to support all these users. Besides, the system needs to be able to immediately handle a large influx of traffic if a major incident occurs.

[Exsmokey]

Good comments regarding Wyoming. Since I left home 40 years ago I've lived in one small city, two small towns (>700 people) and now a large town of 8,000 people. When I moved 70% of the population lived in metro areas. In spite of the widely reported "back to the land" movement the 2010 census showed that 85% of the population now live in metro areas.

Cell phone companies claim, especially AT & T, that they cover X% of the U.S. and those claims might be true in metro areas, but in rural areas the claims are obviously untrue. I've observed that many products and services leave rural areas behind. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find people at service and customer centers to understand your circumstances. I received one reply on the phone that if I went to my nearest Kinko's that I could send a fax and charge it to the company's account and the short term deadline I faced would be solved. When I told her my nearest Kinko's is more than 150 miles away she actually said, that is impossible and to recheck the Yellow Pages in my phone book.

You have folks in Washington D.C., that have the same perspective. They use their cellphones without difficulty everywhere they go, therefore this is true everywhere. They have never worked an emergency in an area where even VHF is working marginally using a 50 watt mobile. They haven't even heard about someone from a land management agency such as a wilderness ranger, having to leave a medical incident to climb a hill in an attempt to find a hilltop/mountaintop with a sweet spot that results in getting into a repeater where other people have to try very hard to copy your audio because of the noise. The last National Forest I worked on has 11 repeater sites on 1.9 million acres, but it still leaves some large and significant areas of both frontcountry and backcountry without coverage.

Now imagine switching to 700 or 800 MHz. The tree needle effect killed efforts of the California Department of Parks and Rec as well Caltrans (our DOT) to convert to statewide 800 MHz systems. Parks and Rec was able to find 4 VHF frequencies for 2 repeater pairs to use in the two districts in the far northwest portion of the state. Caltrans had to continue to use their VHF-Low system. In one river canyon (Smith River) Caltrans applied for 20 repeater sites for a 45 mile section of highway due to coverage problems. Of course the state never initiated this plan.

Now you have a bunch of people who have lived in metro areas all of their lives that have been desk jockeys since they started their careers making plans for "nationwide coverage." I once asked my dad, who was a talented aerospace design engineer why he didn't move in to management. He looked at me as though I should know the answer and said, "because people in management can't design, that is why they are there."

[902]

Originally Posted by jlanfn

I normally try to keep my posts informational, but I will set that aside this time.

A couple of concerns I've had for several years about this nationwide public safety broadband network come to mind.

1. People (politicians mostly) have been touting it as the "be all end all" of interoperability, yet the system will not support any kind of mission critical voice communications for many years. I guess if data interoperability is all you need and you happen to be in a major urban area, it might be useful.
2. Due to the wide world of possible uses for this system, people have been proposing more and more users who need to be on the system, including utilities and second responders. It seems no one has taken a serious look at the capacity of the system to see whether it will be able to support all these users. Besides, the system needs to be able to immediately handle a large influx of traffic if a major incident occurs.

99% of interoperability is human. If two people don't believe they NEED to communicate, they won't regardless of what technological nifties exist.

In 1973, Daniel Kahneman did a seminal study on the limits of the human brain (Attention and effort a really great read, BTW). Our mind has limits and when we introduce new tasks that demand a particular level of processor power, something else gives way. This is what happens when people talk on cellphones while driving (approximating the impairment at the legal limit of intoxication) or texting while driving (which demands so much attention that it has been compared to closing your eyes and just letting the car coast on autopilot). We make tasks for dispatchers, and presume someone will sift through volumes of superfluous materials in order to find a needle of relevance in a mountain of hay. Aside from the practical bandwidth limitations (there's only so much streaming data that can flow through a given range of frequencies, even with MIMO techniques and splitting cells), I'd expect the taxpayer costs for sifting for relevance to be several times more than what it currently is. A 9-1-1 call can last 45 seconds without pre-arrival instructions, and you get a where, a what, and a who. A real-time video can appear with only the caption "This:" and someone has to sift through what might seem obvious to one person, but not to another. Some people actually think this information overload is beneficial (they haven't read Kahneman or subsequent researchers). Knowing how our minds work, we shouldn't expect people to go sifting for unidentified elements, because they work best when looking for something specific.

This contrivance might be putting the technology cart before the human horse.

Politicians think public safety is too... "needy." They won't publicly go against it, but behind closed doors, they won't fight for it, either. By giving them broadband, they fix all of the "I need more spectrum" or "this new technology [think Nextel or LightSquared] is giving me interference" problems, when the public safety element they wave the flag for competes with the revenue element that trumps it behind closed doors. It's an elegant solution that makes this stuff all "go away." It's also a commerce and investment vehicle. Can't make money if everything that needs to be sold has already been sold and there's less money in actually repairing something rather than dumping it and selling something new. So those 33 MHz Motracs that have outlasted 5 fire trucks they've been installed in have to be obsoleted. Those analog trunked systems have to be obsoleted. Those "No thanks, we're good" wideband VHF systems (very little "more channels" came from VHF narrowbanding because of the channel centers selected - UHF did end up better off) have to be obsoleted so people buy newer stuff to achieve their mission. Think about it. Just when all is good, force obsolescence or manufacture a crisis and we'll spend on it. I suppose one might consider that a "stimulus package."