A plan for public-safety interoperability

To the Editor,
Regarding your opinion that fixing public safety requires more than band-aids. There are more fundamental questions to answer. Before you spend my money on a federal mandate, tell me what you are going to spend it for. More 20-year-old technology? More proprietary technology? More technology that’s still vulnerable to a smart group who knows radio networks?
You also say legislation should force first responders to comply with a set of federal requirements. Who will set those requirements? It’s great to talk like this, but the fact is we aren’t ready by a long shot. We don’t have real open standards in place for terminal equipment, or infrastructure, or network management, or any of the other things we need to spend the taxpayers’ dollars effectively.
The Project 25 folks have worked a labor of love for years and their efforts are beginning to bear fruit. So do we enshrine that as federal law? Is it ready? Is it complete? Is it up to date? If not, are we not guilty of negligence in improperly using public funds? If on the other hand we bypass it, we lose the benefit of untold amounts of thought and energy focused on providing a good public-safety communications platform.
Our first task is to couple the basic idea behind Project 25-a standardized public-safety communications framework-to the kind of energy that results from having a serious schedule to meet and serious budget to meet it with.
To do that, we need a real plan, with real goals, schedules, and etc. Here are the absolute barest beginnings of a plan:
Assign lead federal responsibility for standards for public-safety communications to a federal agency. Task that agency and provide funding to do the following:
1. Independently assess (a) the state of public-safety communications, (b) the state of all standards (federal, state, local, and industry) related to public-safety communications and (c) the state of all technology, including what intellectual property is used in deployed or to-be-deployed systems. Set an 18-month deadline for this assessment. Wild-guess estimated cost: $75 million over 18 months.
2. Publicly recognize the work that has been done on Project 25. Grant federal awards to the volunteer staff who have done the work.
3. From the assessment, define the most effective methods to deploy and maintain a standards-based platform for public-safety communications. Allocate two years and $150 million to:
a. Determine what standards must be created or modified to be useful, and which should be retired.
b. Determine ways to structure the platform to make it more resistant to attacks and easier to restore in the wake of a Katrina-level event.
c. Determine a network-management scheme for infrastructure and subscriber units that scales to cover the entire deployed hardware base without modification.
d. Determine ways to allow local jurisdictions to control of assets while ensuring standards are maintained and interoperability is assured.
e. Determine ways to make some control-channel signaling open, to allow monitoring by third parties (e.g. the press) while making other control-channel signaling closed to monitoring.
f. Determine what spectral allocations from an existing set of available spectrum are best suited for this platform. Determine costs to clear spectrum, if needed.
g. Determine how local small businesses are employed to help deploy and maintain the platform.
h. Determine what, if any, intellectual property must be controlled federally to ensure that standards remain open.
i. Define a project schedule.
4. Fund the agency to design, test and implement the platform.
When you get all the way to HERE, THEN you are ready to mandate this and that-not before. Without real open standards, openly arrived at, and a real plan, making anything a matter of federal mandate will be a disaster.
Dave Maples
(The author’s views are his own.)