There’s a lot of discussion going on these days in Washington DC about public safety wireless broadband needs. This discussion has been growing over the past seven years ago. At the core is a very fundamental issue … how can public safety get the data it needs into and out of an incident scene?
Seven years ago, when the conversations regarding a dedicated public safety broadband wireless network first began to develop some momentum, I’m not sure that those of us involved in those discussions realized how rapidly wireless capabilities would be developing. In the few short years since, the capabilities of cell phones and other wireless devices have exploded. Today, it is routine for personal cellular device users to be sending video, surfing the internet surfing, sharing files, navigating traffic, and other data intensive activities on their devices. Additionally, businesses are rapidly embracing the mobile workforce, extending the full office capability to the remote user.
Ten years ago, if public safety needed to connect to data, we were almost assured connectivity. We weren’t competing with the public at large for data over the commercial cellular airwaves. We were competing with a very small group of private users and a limited group of business users and other government agencies. In addition, the data we sent and received were fairly small data packets for simple text based transmissions.
Today, the data that is necessary for us to conduct “routine” public safety business is far greater, including text, GIS, imagery, telemetry, video, etc. Our need for bandwidth to accommodate this has grown. While the commercial cellular service capabilities have grown equally, what we were not prepared for was the mass commercialization of these same technologies for the personal user. As these technologies have become economically affordable to the individual, the use has become wildly prolific.
Now, we are faced with competing for cellular space with many, rather than a few. In some instances, it is killing our ability to connect with our front line public safety responders. Let me give a few recent examples just from my own personal experience.
The Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall is a large event that attracts hundreds of thousands of celebrants each year. This year, multiple resources were staged to assist the public safety mission of the multiple agencies involved. Several of these resources relied on commercial cellular technologies to communicate data back to command centers and to command officials in the field. As the day progressed and the crowds began to saturate the National Mall, especially in areas of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, the cellular based resources quickly began to drop off. Unfortunately, the time that these resources no longer became accessible was the time that they were needed most. At the end of the evening, as the crowds began to leave, the resources began to reconnect and provide data back.
During the Restoring Honor rally in late August, resources that needed commercial cellular technologies to communicate were again lost. In order to prepare for a repeat of the July Fourth experience, these resources were placed on 4G cellular connections – with the assumption that there would be only a few in the crowd also operating on 4G. We lost connectivity anyway ... twenty minutes before the event started - getting back about five minutes before the event ended. Subsequent communication with the carrier showed that a fiber cable had been cut, taking down over 80 of their cell sites. Partner agencies operating on traditional 3G cellular technologies had little to no connectivity throughout the day as well. As the crowds thinned after the event, connectivity was restored, too little, too late.
At the most recent Restoring Honor rally, resources placed on both 3G and 4G technologies failed. Connectivity was lost as the crowd quickly grew and was restored as the crowds left at the end of the event. Again, we found ourselves without critical information during the time period in which we most needed it.
At each of these events, I commiserated with my partnering public safety agencies as they experienced the same pain in the loss of information, efficiency, and effectiveness.
Masses of people who now live in a wireless enabled world, gathering in central areas, and encouraged by news agencies or event producers to text, images, or videos friends, family members, charities, or their own companies, or watching the event real time over the internet from the wireless devices have created untenable situations for those of us with a need to communicate data for situational awareness and command and control.
The scary part is that this environment exists in a routine setting. Now … add something terrible to this already disastrous menu. A suicide bomber detonates a bomb in the middle of the crowd, and now the cell phone usage ramps up even higher. The result is even less capability to connect. Public safety will respond, but we won’t be able to respond in the most efficient, effective, and informed manner, because we can’t access the resources that we need to do so. As a result, perhaps not so many lives are saved, perhaps the threat continues longer, perhaps more destruction takes place.
Several years ago, we participated in a demonstration project here in Washington DC. Spectrum from the abdicated UHF analog television channels was allocated under an experimental license, and a 700 MHz dedicated public safety wireless broadband network was deployed. And it worked! We didn’t have to worry about competing with over 1 million persons who showed up for the Inauguration. While they struggled to complete simple phone call connections on their personal devices, we streamed video over the dedicated network. It was proven reliable. Had something terrible happened on that day, we would have been able to provide our commanders with the situational awareness and information they needed to ensure an effective response.
Here’s the bottom line. Public safety needs a reliable, consistent, and stable platform and backbone for communicating, not just for today’s needs but for tomorrow’s needs. Who knows what capabilities will exist 10 years from now and what we will be able to do over wireless networks. The solution designed today will need to be able to accommodate the technological capability growth that is sure to come in the future years. When the difference in data or no data becomes a life and safety issue, the necessity for continued connectivity is critical. Whatever the solution, it must be one in which public safety has its own dedicated network or portion of a network. It’s not cheap to do that, but then again, neither are the values of the lives that can be saved by having the right tools in place to keep our country and our people safe.