Much has been learned since Adams County made its early entry into FirstNet, the First Responder Network Authority. “The most important lesson here is that if this is done right, it works,” said Adcom911 Executive Director Joel Estes. “It really is a significant improvement for public safety people out in the field.”
Getting there is no small feat, however, as other Early Builder projects have shown. Funded in part by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, these programs make it clear that public safety authorities can expect to meet a range of technical and cultural hurdles on the road to FirstNet deployment.
The Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System (LA-RICS) deployment has drawn high visibility, thanks in part to a successful demonstration of the network at the 2016 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif. With hundreds of thousands of spectators on hand, LA-RICS staff joined with county sheriff and fire departments to demonstrate interoperable communications among more than 120 law enforcement, security, crowd control and emergency response personnel.
During the parade, the network incorporated 90 handheld mobile devices. Planners deployed multiple video applications, along with situational awareness applications. To further test the network, the configuration included eight fixed cameras installed along the parade route, as well as six mobile camera units, all delivering live video feeds.
At the height of the parade, the system delivered service two to three times faster than the service available from commercial networks, FirstNet reported.
Planners first had to wrangle with a mass of misinformation that caused a significant network redesign. “There is a great deal of misunderstanding about electromagnetic emissions,” said former LA-RICS Executive Director Patrick Mallon.
In order to develop its $154.6 million network, LA-RICS, along with partner Motorola, identified 230 likely sites for telecommunications equipment, including primarily public facilities like firehouses and police and sheriff’s stations. This already was a significant reduction from an original list of 750, most of which were dropped in exchange for the state Legislature agreeing to waive a range of costly environmental impact studies.
Those 230 sites would need to cover 620 square miles. (By comparison, Verizon operates more than 1,000 towers in the county.) Then the hitch arose. The firefighters’ union cried foul on the grounds that the radio frequency waves emitted by the towers would represent a potential health hazard for firefighters.
According to the American Cancer Society, “most scientists agree that cellphone antennas or towers are unlikely to cause cancer.” Public concerns persist, however, and union objections ultimately pared back 230 sites to a final list of 77. “We know we have some coverage gaps, and we are going through a process to identify sites that can provide additional coverage, probably 25 to 30 additional sites,” Mallon said.
In retrospect, “an education of the rank and file of what we were trying to build would have helped, but we didn’t have the time or resources to do that,” he said. “We had just over two years to issue an RFP, go through an evaluation process, negotiate a contract, develop a final system design, conduct an environmental assessment, execute site access agreements and then get it all built and turned on.”
FirstNet leadership meanwhile said that much was learned from the L.A. experience that could be used by other builders down the line. “That was a great lesson for us,” said FirstNet Chief Technology Officer Jeff Bratcher. “We saw that we would really need to think about how we would put this together in the future — how we would not be able to rely just on public assets.”
Builders met other hurdles. They wanted utilities on the system, for instance, but the utilities already had their own networks and declined to get involved. LA-RICS also encountered some user pushback on the logistics of field deployment. Technicians needed to pull police cars and fire trucks out of service to install the new communications devices, and departments worried about the temporary loss of assets. LA-RICS countered the problem by performing installations on vehicles that were already in for repairs, whenever possible.
Despite the hurdles encountered early on, Mallon said, the network has proven successful in its ability to open up channels of communication not just among traditional emergency personnel, but also outside the typical front line of responders.
Los Angeles can experience earthquakes, forest fires, flooding rains, coastal activity — any of which may raise the need for outside partners. “In fires we may bring in animal control or the Humane Society to evacuate livestock. The Red Cross can provide emergency housing. We bring in public works to help remove mud from the roads,” Mallon said. “So how do you communicate with those?”
Much as promised, the LA-RICS high-speed network has helped to solve the problem. Secondary responders are linked into the network and lie dormant until needed, thus leaving bandwidth untouched, but still readily accessible in times of crisis.
Just as L.A. leverages its new network investment to loop in secondary responders, Adams County gets double duty from its system through a core-sharing arrangement with New Mexico. Under the terms of the agreement, New Mexico will help to pay for the upkeep and maintenance costs for the Adcom911 host core, a plan that makes sense, according to FirstNet’s Bratcher. Neither entity needed a very expansive array, in which case a shared arrangement seemed most economical. “Why invest in building a separate network core for a relatively small number of sites?” he said.
New Mexico authorities say the hosted core will let them focus on issues such as technical, scheduling and cost concerns that may arise in the integration of remote Radio Access Networks to core networks.
The core sharing plan was mandated by Adcom911’s spectrum lease agreement with FirstNet, which called for Adcom911 and its partner General Dynamics to implement the core share as a key learning condition. Adcom911 put $4 million toward the $16 million project, with the rest coming from a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grant.
The learning condition “was actually a good thing, because it forces you to branch out and look at alternative ways of accomplishing whatever you are trying to accomplish,” Bratcher said. In addition to core sharing, FirstNet also asked that Adcom911 report back on the operational and governance outcomes of its real-world testing, the validation procedures used in device testing and its live operational processes.
The New Mexico Department of Information Technology said the hosted-core arrangement will allow it to address issues along the southwest border with Mexico, with the hope that enhanced public safety communications will better support border security.
Both parties have suggested the shared core might serve other purposes down the road, perhaps as a failover for either user or as a source of enhanced interoperability between systems.
In the more immediate term, the network is bringing dramatically enhanced capabilities to the field, Estes said. Where commercial carriers may be delivering 3 Mbps download speed and 1.5 up, the Adcom911 network is humming along at 40 Mbps down and 25 up in densely populated areas. In less populated areas, the system still runs 5 up and 2.5 down, a considerable improvement over past solutions. A launching event for the network included a patrol car, fire vehicle and mobile command post.
Adams County’s success as an Early Builder may be due in part to Adcom911’s status as a quasigovernmental body, one positioned outside the usual bureaucracy. “We are not a huge government agency. We make decisions relatively quickly,” Estes said. “It is probably because of that structure that we were able to move faster than some other agencies. We did not have to go through lots of layers.”
The presence of an existing infrastructure also helped to move things along. “We already had our own radio system in place,” Estes said, “so we were able to collocate much of our infrastructure with those existing radio sites.”
This also proved true in situations in which other entities’ existing deployments could be expanded upon, for example in Adcom911’s deployment of three sites at Denver International Airport, Estes said. “The airport did have coverage, but they were looking to improve what they had for their emergency response people.”
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to this early effort came in the realm of deployment. While Los Angeles met resistance from end users reluctant to part with their vehicles, Adcom911 encountered some technical setbacks in installing a system that was new to everyone. “Getting the equipment into the cars, getting it wired in, that was a somewhat slower process,” Estes said. “The techs aren’t used to installing these things, so getting everything put in the right place, getting the antennas situated, it can take a while for that to happen.”
An LTE training center, presently under development, presumably will help to alleviate some of that stress. The center will also provide a venue for testing new devices, software and hardware in order to continue developing the system. “We are always looking for new and innovative ways to leverage this technology,” Estes said.
For Early Builders in New Jersey, meanwhile, a FirstNet spectrum license came with the request that authorities take on the key learning task of constructing a network that would rely heavily on mobile assets. “We are not going to be able to build towers in all locations across the country, there is going to have to be some portion of the network that comes through deployable systems,” Bratcher said. FirstNet was eager to see how that would play out.
The result is JerseyNet, whose fixed assets cover three key regions at all times: the Route 21 Corridor, Camden and Atlantic City. PMC is the prime contractor, and Oceus Networks and Fujitsu are subcontractors on the network, which is complemented by deployable assets in the form of antenna trailers that act as fixed towers when deployed. They can extend JerseyNet connectivity anywhere in the state or even beyond state borders.
This notion of deployable networks may prove critical in areas where fixed assets are impractical. At the same time, this early effort in New Jersey will likely offer a valuable model for others down the road.
In a deployable network, “there are hundreds of nuggets you want to make sure that you take into account,” said Ray Lehr, Maryland’s former state interoperability director and now an independent consultant working with FEMA Region III on FirstNet issues.
“What vehicles will you need to erect an antenna? Can you drive it into a parking garage to get that antenna onto the highest levels?” Lehr said. “These things are small and they aren’t obvious — just looking at the equipment and how you put it to work — but they are going to be important for everyone.”
JerseyNet has shown broad success in tackling these questions, for example, by providing critical coverage during a papal visit to Philadelphia in September 2015. In that early demonstration, JerseyNet delivered secure communications and live streaming security video via two system-on-wheels trailers stationed in the upper levels of parking garages.
In August 2015, the Atlantic City Police Department in conjunction with the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP) turned to JerseyNet to provide reliable, uninterrupted transmission of video, voice and radio communications for two major concerts — Maroon 5 and Rascal Flatts — with a combined audience of nearly 100,000 fans.
Success at such large-scale gatherings provides a critical proof-of-concept for FirstNet. “At the big events, you can have a lot of people using the commercial system,” Bratcher said. “There needs to be a solution where public safety can be the only users on the system, so it is free and clear and there when they need it.”
Despite such early wins, JerseyNet planners say the system’s implementation hasn’t been a slam dunk, especially when it comes to engaging the participation of first responder agencies that were not always up to speed on the program, said Eric Tysarczyk, director of policy and planning for NJOHSP. “We want to be able to say to everyone, ‘It is going to be important that we all are using this,’” he said. “The problem is that that national backbone will not come to fruition for five to 10 years.”
As FirstNet moves toward a broader vision of interoperability, planners are working to keep partners engaged. Tysarczyk’s team keeps up a steady flow of information, reaching out across the spectrum of public safety agencies, even attending first responder training events to share the word. “Anytime there is external opportunity, we always try to make ourselves available,” he said.
On the technical side, builders in New Jersey are moving ahead despite uncertainties about which implementations will be used in FirstNet’s long-term deployment. As they move ahead, they are working on the premise that technologies will align over time, as long as any solution sticks to the fundamentals.
“The driving goal is to support the capabilities of the first responders. If you maintain fidelity to that, you can get through any of the technological questions,” Tysarczyk said. “We have strategic assumptions about what the FirstNet program will deliver, and we are doing our proof-of-concept so that it can embrace that national effort.”
In examining these diverse First Builder programs, it may be the act of scrutiny that turns out to be most significant.
When commercial carriers roll out their networks, deployment often happens under the cloak of proprietary information: Outsiders may get a peek at how networks are built and operated, but they likely don’t get a deep dive.
With FirstNet on the other hand, “it is all very visible,” said Lehr. Given FirstNet’s insistence on key learning conditions, the lessons of the Early Builders likely will roll out rapidly and effectively among the next wave of municipalities to come on board, as they draw from the experiences of the Early Builders.
“That is a very valuable premise,” Lehr said. “This is going to be visible to the public safety community, to Congress, to every state. Getting as much information as possible not just about the technology but about the politics and the process — those things are going to help FirstNet and its potential partners quite a bit.”
