Finally, he added: “Whoever is going to be that rst agency
to have to make this decision will be in a really bad place
and nobody is going to want to be the rst to try it and be in
a position of saying ‘this might not work’. More often than
not, really hard decisions are made because somebody had
to make a nancial decision which forces an agency to go
down a certain path.”
Falgiatore was followed by Harlin McEwen, former
FirstNet PSAC chair and public safety communications
consultant, who won a round of applause from the audience
by emphatically pointing out that we already have a
good denition of mission-critical: “If you’re in public
safety, you know what the hell mission-critical means, it
means it has to always work… this is not business as usual,
this is life-and-death stu. If the police ocers can’t talk to
each other when they’re in a gunght, somebody’s going to
get killed. If a reghter gets trapped in a building and he
can’t talk or ask for help, he dies. It means mission-critical
has to work.”
TJ Kennedy, former FirstNet president and CEO of the
Public Safety Technology Alliance (PSTA), emphasised that
“in the US we have the option of embracing LMR and
LTE at the same time”, which means that the public safety
community “can get years experience under their belt” in
terms of understanding how broadband networks and devices
perform in all conditions. He also noted that multiple
commercial operators are shifting to a more mission-critical
approach in terms of how they manage and operate their
networks and that resiliency with broadband networks can be
achieved through a combination of approaches including the
use of deployables, back-up generation, redundant backhaul
and network management – “e good news is it can be
done, the bad news is that it’s not simple.”
Which standards?
I also attended a roundtable on the PSTA’s work. It is a
non-prot organisation that is working to ensure that the
public safety communications community has access to
open-standards-based technology. Much of this revolves
around trying to assess which standard(s) the public safety
sector should put its weight behind for specic technologies,
and to this end, the PSTA has a number of technical subcommittees
(cybersecurity, identity/single sign-on, missioncritical
IWCE Review
If you’re in public safety, you know
what the hell mission-critical
means, it means it has to always work…
this is not business as usual, this is
life-and-death stuff
PTT/video/data, mapping/location-based services,
situational awareness, and LMR-LTE interoperability).
TJ Kennedy highlighted feedback from public safety
agencies about the lack of interoperability between mapping
applications as an example of where the PSTA’s approach
could be of benet. He also said that “in many cases we
suspect by the end of the rst half of this year that we will be
able to publish in many of these technical sub-committees
their initial choices for open standards and APIs. ey will
also be working on draft test cases to ensure that equipment
can be tested by independent third parties.”
Tales from the reground
Jason Matthews, sergeant/COML at Lake County Sheri’s
Oce, Florida, began a session that looked at some of the
lessons that can be learned from recent natural disasters,
citing how his state’s public safety communications fared in
the wake of Hurricane Michael. Matthews explained that on
the rst day there was no contact with several counties at all,
there was limited use of LMR, mobile networks and PSAPs
were out of service and there were major power outages
(numerous counties experienced 100 per cent blackouts); the
statewide radio system had limited coverage and no dispatch
capability. As a result of this, high-frequency (HF) radios
and satellite phones “were king” for 24-48 hours. It ended
up taking two to three days to deploy resources to some of
the rural counties, and the mobile networks were down for
days until mobile assets were brought in – “AT&T along
with FirstNet provided a quick response and we had some
coverage back into these areas pretty fast.”
Public safety answering point (PSAP) outages occurred
due to a lot of single points of failure – Matthews explained
that all of the bre in North West Florida is above ground
“because it’s cheap; we went down roads where four to
ve miles of poles were snapped up… you don’t recover
from that very easily”. He added that auxiliary emergency
communications/amateur radio were heavily used and
were the only form of long-range communications to some
counties for several days. He said in some cases, they had to
airdrop satellite phones into rural counties, and one issue was
that most of the aected counties were still using UHF and
VHF, whereas the responders from the metropolitan areas
had switched over to 800MHz – though this was addressed
with the aid of LMR vendors.
Both Kody Kerwin, public safety communications
specialist at Contra Costa County Fire Protection District,
and Chris Baker, a captain of the US Civil Air Patrol and
retired battalion chief and investigator from the Roseville
California Fire Department, gave their perspectives on
the struggle to contain last year’s wildres in California,
with a focus on the Carr, Mendocino Complex and Camp
res. Kerwin noted that the Mendocino Complex re was
the largest in California’s history, burning nearly 460,000
TJ Kennedy
highlighted that
resilience can
be achieved
with commercial
networks, but “it’s
not simple”
April Supplement 2019 @CritCommsToday 15