With the FirstNet board preparing to move forward with the award of its approximately $6.5 billion contract to build a national public safety LTE network, the organization has laid the groundwork to move quickly in its first weeks and months.
A special meeting of the FirstNet board will be held on Tuesday, at which the board is expected to vote on the final award of the contract. The award had been held up for a number of months by a lawsuit filed by Rivada Mercury, protesting that it had been ruled out of the competitive range for the award. AT&T is the only publicly known entity that is still in the running.
At the FirstNet board’s meeting in mid-March, some of the updates it received included the most recent information on the plans for FirstNet’s first 100 days of operation. Goals for the first six months have been laid out in FirstNet’s Request for Proposal.
Richard Reed, FirstNet’s chief customer officer, described the 100-day plan to the board as:
-Within the first 24 hours after making the award, FirstNet will immediately notify the state-level Single Points of Contact and FirstNet’s Public Safety Advisory Committee with initial information about the partner and the timing going forward. Cox said that FirstNet plans to schedule a webinar shortly after the award is made “to make sure everyone hears the most up-to-date information with all the information we can release, what we know and what we don’t.”
-A period of kickoff meetings to “talk about the deluge of things that are going to happen.” At the board’s December meeting, James Mitchell, FirstNet director of program management, told the board that “we envision a one to two-week kickoff, I think, because of the magnitude of this work and because of what’s expected moving forward with a partner from a national perspective.”
-Begin development of State Plans. FirstNet and the partner must put together a tailored plan for each of the 56 states and territories, which will be the basis for each governor’s decision whether to opt in or opt out of FirstNet – a crucial decision that will impact FirstNet’s business case. T.J. Kennedy, president of FirstNet, told the board during its March meeting that there are three initial task orders to move forward on: launching a web portal so that draft and final state plans can be delivered via an online interface; development of the actual plans; and design of a core network. FirstNet, he added, wants to “move with extreme urgency to get the plans in front of public safety agencies and work with them to make sure plans are communicated to the right people and questions are answered so we can move forward with the opt-in/opt-out process.”
FirstNet has spent the past few years engaging with federal, state and local first responders to collect information about their communications needs and desires as well as their potential concerns about the network, and data from those engagements informed the RFP. Kennedy told the FirstNet board that based on FirstNet’s engagements with the states, FirstNet and its partner will develop draft plans and submit those to all of the states and territories; then work with each state and territory to make sure the plan reflects their needs and address questions or issues and tweak the plans accordingly, then submit final versions of the State Plans to each state and territory. At that point, the governor of each state has 90 days to decide whether to opt in or opt out of FirstNet.
According to the milestones set out in the RFP, the web interface for State Plan delivery and the completion and delivery of all of the State Plans is slated to happen within six months of the award being made. During testimony before U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet last June, FirstNet CEO Mike Poth said that “Following the development of draft State Plans, FirstNet plans to provide each state and territory with an opportunity to review and discuss the draft plans with FirstNet prior to the delivery of the final plan to the governor. FirstNet will strive to provide State Plans that are detailed, accurate, and comprehensive, with the information necessary for each governor to make an informed decision.” He added, however, that “states and territories have been advised that the opportunity to make wholesale changes to these plans will be minimal and the time to review will be constrained due in part to the Act’s directive to speed deployment of the network.”
When Poth testified last summer, FirstNet’s goal was to deliver final State Plans to governors in 2017. That may still be a possibility if the RFP is awarded soon and the plans can be accomplished within the six-month timeframe that FirstNet laid out.
Once states have decided whether to opt in or opt out – and even if they opt out and design their own Radio Access Network, their networks will still have to be interoperable with the rest of the network and use FirstNet’s core — deployment can begin. The RFP lays out an ambitious vision for rolling out the network. There is a phaed deployment plan, with the first phase of milestones targeted for completion within six months from the award and providing national coverage “through existing wireless service” via a FirstNet-branded MVNO that may or may not rely on Band 14, according to the RFP. “The initial launch of the NPSBN may use existing wireless services branded as ‘FirstNet,” similar to a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) implementation,” according to the RFP. That coverage can be supplemented with Band 14 deployables and range extension technologies such as satellite services and high-power user equipment for coverage deficiencies and public safety emergencies, the RFP says.
Other targets for the first six months include: ·
- Establishment of a FirstNet applications store for apps specific to public safety; an app developer ecosystem and APIs for certified public safety applications, as well as hosted cloud services for public safety agencies and app developers.
- Enablement of local control for agencies to manage accounts, subscriptions, users, groups and basic profiles.
- A Public Safety Entity (PSE) home page with information on agency adoption, the status of the network, and support for local agency customization.
- A portfolio of non-Band 14 devices and a roadmap for planned Band 14 devices, including smartphones, tablets and modems, in-vehicle routers, specialized devices, accessories and machine-to-machine devices; as well as enablement for BYOD.
- Core systems that support non-Band 14 services, including provisioning and management; and that are hardened and include basic security as well as network monitoring.
- A customer relationship management implementation as well as sales, billing, etc. that “[utilizes] existing business support systems.”
Looking for more information on FirstNet’s short-term and long-term goals and challenges? Read RCR Wireless News’ special report on the topic and watch the webinar.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed Richard Reed’s information to FirstNet board member Neil Cox. RCR Wireless regrets the error.
