by AllThingsECC.com | Apr 27, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
What makes FirstNet such a functional and irreplaceable system is not only its technological capacity but also the institutional knowledge built over more than a decade. The Response Operations Group is composed of former first responders who understand past failures and anticipate problems, while maintaining direct, trusted relationships with local, state, and federal authorities.
SOURCE: MSN
DATE: April 26, 2026
Congress must pass HR 7386 without delay. If it works, don’t touch it.
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by AllThingsECC.com | Mar 30, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
Effective emergency response relies on the ability of different agencies to communicate seamlessly with each other. In the past, this was a real problem due to public safety agencies using a variety of proprietary land mobile radios (LMRs) that couldn’t talk to each other.
Michael Barnbeck, Deputy Executive Director of the Public Safety Broadband Technology Association (PSBTA) remembers this all too well. When he started his previous 25-year career with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, communicating with other agencies was extremely difficult.
by AllThingsECC.com | Feb 22, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
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.
by AllThingsECC.com | Feb 13, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
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.
by AllThingsECC.com | Feb 12, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
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.
by AllThingsECC.com | Feb 9, 2026 | Articles, Comm Center News
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.
