by AllThingsECC.com | May 24, 2019 | Articles, Comm Center News
By Edward Parkinson, FirstNet Authority Acting CEO
In our latest Annual Report to Congress, the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet Authority) outlines the significant progress made in fiscal year (FY) 2018 to deliver on Congress’s vision of creating a truly nationwide, interoperable broadband public safety network. It was a landmark year for public safety, as the FirstNet network deployment began ahead of schedule following the decisions of all U.S. states and territories and the District of Columbia to participate in the deployment of the nationwide public safety broadband network.
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by AllThingsECC.com | May 24, 2019 | Comm Center News
FCC Approves 10 Temporary Waivers of 9-1-1 Location Accuracy Rules
The FCC approved waivers of its wireless E9-1-1 location accuracy standards and reporting requirements for 10 rural wireless providers.
Each waiver will terminate six months after the provider receives a request for Phase 2 location data from a public-safety answering point (PSAP). Each waiver is conditioned on the carrier notifying the commission within 30 days of receipt of a valid request for Phase 2 location information from a PSAP.
Under the rules, commercial mobile radio service (CMRS) providers must meet increasingly stringent wireless 9-1-1 location accuracy metrics at periodic benchmarks. Providers must also periodically report aggregated data on the location technologies used in their networks for live 9-1-1 calls, both indoor and outdoor.
Nationwide CMRS providers must file quarterly reports aggregating live 9-1-1 call data from six representative cities, known as test cities. Every six months, non-nationwide CMRS providers must report live 9-1-1 call data, either for one or more of the test cities or for the largest county in their footprint, depending on the area served by the provider. Within 60 days after each location accuracy benchmark date, all CMRS providers must certify their compliance with the location accuracy requirements as of the benchmark date.
The carriers who requested the waivers are small, rural wireless providers and said that the PSAPs in their service areas are either not capable of receiving E9-1-1 Phase 2 location data or have not requested that the carriers provide Phase 2 location data. The carriers said they will provide the location data required by the rules upon request from a capable PSAP, but until then, they requested a waiver of the indoor location accuracy benchmarks and reporting requirements.
The FCC determined that the public interest would not be served by requiring the carriers to supply the enhanced location information to PSAPs that are incapable of receiving it and therefore, approved the petitions.
The carriers receiving the waivers are AST Telecom, Bristol Bay Cellular Partnership, Choice Wireless, Copper Valley Wireless, Docomo Pacific, Manti Tele Communications, PTI Pacifica, TelAlaska Cellular, Windy City Cellular and WUE.
Find the full order here.
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by AllThingsECC.com | May 23, 2019 | Comm Center News
CentralSquare Acquires Tellus
CentralSquare, a provider of public-safety and administration software in North America, already works with 5,000 public-safety agencies. To accelerate the building of a single, virtual 9-1-1 dispatch system, current CentralSquare clients will immediately receive complimentary access to real-time situational awareness across jurisdictions.
An estimated 240 million calls are made to 9-1-1 across America each year. The calls come in to more than 8,900 different primary and secondary dispatch centers. These dispatch centers use multiple types of software systems, preventing dispatchers from easily identifying, deploying and coordinating emergency response across jurisdictions. This results in longer responses to life-threatening emergencies. This also leads to coordination challenges during natural disasters where dozens of police, fire and EMS services need to work collectively to prevent damage to life and property.
“CentralSquare already provides the broadest, smartest and most unified technology platform for nearly 5,000 public-safety agencies across North America,” said Steve Seoane, executive vice president and general manager of public safety at CentralSquare. “Going forward, seamless two-way integration between CAD systems will come standard out of the box on the CentralSquare Public Safety platform. As soon as a community deploys the CentralSquare Public Safety Platform, it will be able to seamlessly integrate law enforcement, fire and EMS resources with all neighboring communities. Our solution preserves the autonomy of each dispatch center as it integrates into existing CAD workstations. This eliminates the need for retraining dispatchers and builds on the unique local requirements at each center.”
With the acquisition, CentralSquare is promoting “public safety without borders” by building a single, virtual dispatch system across North America, where multiple agencies on disparate 9-1-1 software solutions can operate and communicate with each other as if they are on a single system, thereby reducing response time and saving lives. The FCC estimates that speeding up emergency response by one minute could save 253,032 nationally.
“For over 10 years, Tellus has been providing ‘safety without borders,’ erasing the lines between cities, towns and counties so that critical emergency response information can flow effortlessly to the closest first responder, expediting emergency response and saving lives,” said Tellus President Jonathan Mitchell. “Hundreds of agencies have using the Tellus solution to cut down emergency response time. … It’s exciting to join CentralSquare in bringing this powerful technology to the largest community of public-safety agencies in North America.”
CentralSquare will continue to support and upgrade all Tellus products for current customers, irrespective of the CAD system the agency uses, ensuring that citizens can benefit from faster response to emergencies.
“Seamless CAD-to-CAD connectivity is just one step in our vision to ensure that all agencies nationally can easily access each other’s data and resources,” said CentralSquare CEO Simon Angove. “We are making record-breaking investments in R&D to ensure that, in using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and other technologies, we are building a network where all agencies can quickly respond to emergencies, investigate crimes, pre-detect terror threats and mitigate casualties in natural disasters. Our mission is to make North America safer by making every community smarter and stronger.”
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by AllThingsECC.com | May 16, 2019 | Comm Center News
House Committee Infrastructure Bill Includes $12B in NG 9-1-1 Funding
The Leading Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s (LIFT) America Act includes $12 billion in grants for the implementation of NG 9-1-1 services. According to the draft bill released by the committee, grant funds could be used for implementing NG 9-1-1, establishing and maintaining NG 9-1-1, performing public outreach and education on how best to use NG 9-1-1 and its capabilities and usefulness, and covering administrative costs associated with the planning and implementation of NG 9-1-1.
Under the proposed bill, the grant funds could cover up to 80 percent of the cost of any eligible project. The rest of the project would need to come from matching funds.
The $12 billion in grant funding would be appropriated from 2020 to 2024.
The bill would also appropriate $40 billion for the deployment of secure and high-speed broadband service to move toward a goal of making broadband available to 98 percent of the U.S. Additionally, the bill would create a program, with funding of $5 billion, that would offer secured loans, lines of credit or loan guarantees to finance broadband infrastructure buildout projects.
The committee will hold a hearing on the bill May 22.
Find the full text of the bill here.
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by AllThingsECC.com | May 16, 2019 | Comm Center News
Congressman Proposes Tying T-Band Delay to Ending 9-1-1 Fee Diversion
The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, which created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), mandates that by 2021, Congress begin a process to auction the T-band spectrum. Within two years of the auction’s completion, public-safety licensees in the band must vacate the spectrum.
During a May 15 FCC oversight hearing by the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Rep. Greg Walden, Republican leader for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, proposed delaying the start of that process to 2024.
“To be eligible for this delay, states and localities would simply need to comply with a very common-sense policy that bipartisan bills have already called for, which is to put an end to 9-1-1 fee diversion,” Walden said.
Walden said he would soon release a draft of the proposal and encouraged committee feedback.
The FCC’s most recent report on 9-1-1 fee diversion, released in December, found that nearly 10 percent of funds collected in 2017 were diverted to uses other than 9-1-1. According to that report, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, Rhode Island, West Virginia and the U.S. Virgin Islands all diverted 9-1-1 fees during 2017.
“This ought to be mail fraud, frankly, because some communities and states are telling their consumers on their phone bill, ‘You’re paying for 9-1-1,’ when in fact they take the money and spend it elsewhere,” Walden said. “We need to take care of our 9-1-1 system, and consumers have the right to know that they’re being defrauded by their own governments in some cases.”
In his opening testimony to the subcommittee, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who has repeatedly reprimanded states for diverting fees and pushed them to end the practice, said more legislation for the issue is necessary. Some states are working to end the practice, but a few are not, he said.
“The ‘name and shame’ process generated by our annual report has only been so helpful,” O’Rielly said. “The state leaders of certain recalcitrant states — New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island — don’t seem to care about the shaming part.”
O’Rielly said he found Walden’s proposal intriguing and was interested in learning more.
According to an FCC fact sheet on the T-band, there are 925 public-safety entities that hold licenses in the T-band. Those licenses cover 11 metropolitan areas across the country including Boston, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco/Oakland and Washington, D.C.
The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act does not specifically address business/industrial (B/I) incumbents in the T-band. In April, the Enterprise Wireless Alliance (EWA) asked the FCC to designate the Part 90 800 MHz guard band spectrum as “green space” for relocating incumbents from the T-band.
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by AllThingsECC.com | May 15, 2019 | Articles, Comm Center News
By Dave Buchanan, FirstNet Authority Executive Director of Public Safety Advocacy
Recently, the Public Safety Advisory Committee’s (PSAC) Tribal Working Group (TWG) met in Nashville, Tennessee for its semi-annual in-person meeting. The two-day engagement was an opportunity for the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet Authority) to update TWG delegates about FirstNet’s latest developments, hear from tribal leaders about their network needs, and highlight real-world FirstNet use cases in tribal communities.
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