Late last month, the California Fire Chiefs Association reversed its position of support
for NextNav, withdrawing that support in a letter to the FCC. This prompted a statement
from NextNav’s Vice President of Government Affairs, Ed Mortimer, where he said they
believed the association was misinformed by “special interest,” according to a statement
from Mortimer.
Back in 2015, during one of the early FirstNet hearings on Capitol Hill, the Chair of FirstNet, Sue Swenson, briefed our nation’s elected officials on FirstNet, its progress, and the direction it was heading. With the confidence of a seasoned corporate telecommunications executive, she spoke about the many successes and how the network was going to get built. At one point, she was asked if they were going to reach their 2022 deployment goal. In her ever-present calm demeanor, she looked up at the dais and said, “Yes. If we don’t, I mean, we should be shot,” which clearly caused an awkward pause (and laughter), as the straightforward answer surprised many who were used to hedged responses like, “I think we can,” or “we will do our best.” Well, history has shown that she and the FirstNet Board got it done and indeed met all their 2022 goals.
Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT) is an international 3GPP standard that allows public safety agencies to use broadband cellular networks (4G/LTE and 5G) with the same one-button Push-to-Talk feature as their traditional Land Mobile Radios (LMR).
In plain English, MCPTT makes a smartphone as quick and easy to use as a one-button PTT LMR handset. What makes MCPTT so different is that it uses the high-speed data capacity of cellular networks to enable live video streaming, file sharing, and real-time location tracking, capabilities that traditional voice-only radio systems simply cannot match.
I’m writing this as a local fire chief in mid-Missouri and representing NAEMT on the Public Safety Advisory Committee to the FirstNet Authority. Those two roles are not separate. What happens in Washington DC, directly affects what happens in a patient’s living room, in the cab of a fire engine, or in the middle of a multi-agency incident where nothing is clean and nothing is predictable.
For a system or product to be preferred by its users, it has to offer unique features that are not provided by its competitors.
Take wireless broadband communications for first responders—the police, fire EMS, and other public safety agencies that protect the public and save lives. In this area, FirstNet is the preferred network for first responders, precisely because it has unique features that no other carrier can offer.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Department of Commerce, appears to be pursuing a coup to take control over the FirstNet Authority. I have been informed that draft legislative language has been circulating that would materially alter FirstNet’s governance structure. Notably, credible reporters have contacted individuals for comment on legislation that those individuals had not seen—suggesting that information has been selectively shared outside stakeholder channels.
