From left: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, North Las Vegas Fire Department Chief Al Gillespi and Directions Inc. President Joe Hanna testify on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Feb. 16, Before the Senate Commerce Committee hearing. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

In his opening statement of Wednesday’s U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing, Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) invoked the memories of 9/11, stating that his legislation (S.28) is the committee’s top priority in light of the upcoming 10th anniversary. “Tragedy knows no boundaries,” he said. “Besides New York or Washington, emergencies occur every day in urban and rural communities across the country. … When an emergency happens, we rely on first responders like police, firefighters and public safety officials to keep us from harm. Far too often we talk about the important role these brave first responders play, but fail to give them the tools they need to do their job.”

The hearing, titled Safeguarding Our Future: Building a Nationwide Network for First Responders, focused on S.28, the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act of 2011, which would reallocate 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700 band (D Block) to public safety to build a nationwide interoperability broadband network. Speakers included Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security; New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly; Delaware Governor Jack A. Markell; Las Vegas Fire Department Chief Al Gillespie, who serves as first vice president, International Association of Fire Chiefs; and Joe Hanna, president of Directions Inc. and a past president of APCO International.

According to Rockefeller, the bill will reallocate the D Block to public safety and give the FCC the authority to auction spectrum that is voluntarily returned. The auctions would provide the funding for the construction and maintenance of the public safety network. He said, “This bill marries resources for first responders with good commercial spectrum policy. It can keep us safe — and help grow our economy.”

In response, Ranking Committee Member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) expressed her support for the reallocation of the D Block to public safety. She said, “When school children are walking to school with cutting-edge smart phones capable of video conferencing and high-speed Internet connections, our first responders should have more than walkie-talkies and notes across rubble.”

Hutchison also expressed concerns about funding the network for public safety. She wants to work with Rockefeller to combine his priorities for public safety with her priorities for wireless development to drive job creation and economic growth. Hutchison has drafted a bill, the Wireless Innovation Spectrum Enhancement Act, which would allocate the D Block to public safety and fund it through grants from auction revenue and no-interest loans to public safety. Funding would also be targeted to rural and other high-cost locations to build out the network nationally.

King, who recently introduced a similar bill in the House (HR 9601), was first to address the committee. He spoke in support of Rockefeller’s and Hutchison’s shared position, saying, he agrees with their motivations and hopes the differences in approaches will be overcome with time. “Put simply, the current situation is unacceptable,” he says.

Reality on the Ground
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly took the floor to address the capabilities this network would provide for public safety. He said, “Our existing communications systems are fast becoming obsolete. Like virtually all other public safety organizations, the New York City Police Department relies principally on the use of two-way voice radios to communicate with responding officers and direct them to a scene. However, this technology is extremely limited. We cannot use it to exchange electronic data.”

Kelly noted that his region would benefit from a national public safety broadband network by having access to the technology New York City is employing at its Real Time Crime Centers. The center includes a massive searchable database with billions of public and private records. The center is also looking to deploy facial recognition. “With a dedicated broadband network, we would be able to push this information out to tens of thousands of officers on patrol,” he said.

He also said that, according to experts he has talked to, the current spectrum is too narrow to send this data out into the field, and that it often doesn’t penetrate buildings. He also stressed the importance of public safety having control over the network, saying, “We know from past experience that we can’t depend on systems run by the private sector. They are too susceptible to failure in a crisis. On September 11th and after the 2009 crash of a commercial jet in the Hudson River, cell phone networks were deluged and police and fire communications over them became virtually impossible.”

Key Issues
Representing the National Governors Association on the panel was Markell, whose background includes working in the commercial industry to acquire the spectrum to build Nextel’s nationwide network. He noted that the development of this network depends on access to sufficient spectrum, funding and clear governance guidelines. “Efforts to address one issue without solving or supporting a solution for the others will only hinder progress towards reliable interoperable communications,” he said.

Markell discussed the success of Delaware’s statewide 800 MHz narrowband system, which is used by all the state’s public safety agencies. Although the system and others like it are “truly interoperable,” they do not support broadband data.

“By combing the D block with the existing 10 MHz of adjacent public safety spectrum, public safety communications could eventually be migrated from other spectrum bands to allow for more streamlined, efficient and cost-effective communications systems,” he said.

“While the migration of voice systems to broadband should be explored for potential future consolidation, please note that this cannot happen overnight,” he continued. “The narrowband spectrum is currently used by state and local governments for existing or developing interoperable voice communications systems that cannot be migrated to broadband until the technology has been further developed.”

A Different Perspective
Joe Hanna represented a different perspective on the panel, saying that “if used prudently” the 24 MHz of spectrum public safety currently has in the 700 band can provide enough capacity for daily needs.

He said, “I think, everyone in this room agrees that our first responders should have all the tools they need to serve the public, including access to state-of-the-art wireless broadband communications. We fail to agree, however, on the fact that there are two paths that can provide public safety with the wireless broadband services that they need and they deserve.”

Hanna recommended using public safety’s current spectrum in connection with commercial spectrum, as proposed in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. He said the LTE platform, which has been accepted as the standard for a public safety broadband network, allows seamless priority access in the event of a system overload.

Regarding funding, Hanna noted that public/private partnerships envisioned in the NBP will help reduce the cost of the network to the public in terms of economy of scale. He said, “Core communications capabilities for the public safety broadband network should be centered around a dedicated, public safety grade broadband network. And it should recognize no distractions between urban, rural and suburban boundaries.”

Hanna noted that the current economic crisis will not allow the implementation of the network without an infusion of federal funds. He also said he does not believe the public safety needs to hold the licenses for the entire spectrum.

“To not be able to use that spectrum in an aggregated form has the potential to leave a large volume of critical spectrum laying fallow in some parts of the country. … I think the greatest flaw in the reallocation of the D Block to public safety … would be the unintended consequences of creating an island technology — a band class 14 subset that only first responders will use. With no commercial economies of scale, public safety will again find itself held hostage by a limited number of providers, thus resulting in the current low demand, high cost marketplace faced everyday in the public safety land mobile environment.”

Public/Private Partnerships
The greatest concern among the senators on the committee was funding — funding for the network’s construction, particularly in rural areas that do not currently have Internet or wireless access, and maintenance. Senators stated that they did not want public safety to be constantly coming back to the federal government for funding. The president’s proposal recommends investing $5 billion for rural areas separately from public safety.

According to Markell, “Regardless of whether [the network] is built on 10 or 20 MHz of spectrum, construction of a nationwide network will be a costly endeavor.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) put it best when he said, “We continue to think that people who have spectrum can continue to use less and less of it. I’m wondering how much we need to reserve and how much we can afford to build out. … Why have we allocated more spectrum to the private sector than we think they need, but the public sector [spectrum] needs to be as big as it needed to be a few years ago. … I think our goal should be getting this system working, getting it working across the country.”

He added, “I’m particularly concerned that we don’t allocate a lot of spectrum that nobody can afford to develop, particularly prior to exhausting every other avenue we might take, so that we have full access to developed spectrum, so that we have public safety access.”

Panelists were open to the idea of having public/private partnerships to ensure the network is truly nationwide. During his testimony, Markell stated, “Commercial wireless operators will continue to spend billions of dollars deploying broadband facilities that mirror those that public safety will construct and operate. Constructive and innovative partnerships with commercial operators might achieve economies of scale and allow sharing of construction and operating costs to the benefit of both parties. By putting public safety in control of the spectrum, the playing field is leveled to enable such beneficial arrangements.”

Later during the hearing, Markell said, “The issue of relying on the commercial sector for communications is reliability. … I do believe that there are plenty of opportunities within [the] proposed legislation for there to be creative partnerships between the public and private sectors. As a general matter we should not be in a position where public safety should have to rely on a private sector network, but I do believe that there would be and should be opportunities for the private sector to participate.”

Moving Forward
From the public safety perspective, the hearing went well. Yucel Ors, APCO International’s director of government relations, says, “It was very positive discussion, and it is moving the ball forward in the Senate. Now there is not only Senate Bill 28, but also draft legislation from Sen. Hutchinson. There is also discussion that senators McCain and Lieberman are going to introduce legislation. Clearly there is dedication from the Senate and the House to move forward with this legislation this year.”

Ors also commented on the issue of funding, stating that public safety believes that the legislation provides sufficient funding to build out a nationwide interoperable public safety broadband network that includes the D Block.

Click here to view the entire hearing online and read the full statements.

About the Author
Natasha Yetman is associate editor for APCO’s Public Safety Communications magazine. Contact her via e-mail at yetmann@apcointl.org.