WASHINGTON-The Association of Public-safety Communications Officials last month broke with other public-safety advocates and the telecommunications industry, refusing to support a report to the FCC’s Network Reliability & Interoperability Council.
“While NRIC VII work group 1A was chartered to minimize the conflicting ambiguous language provided in previous Federal Communications Commission rules and bulletins, the language contained in the current document supporting this work group’s recommendations fails to resolve, and even compounds, the conflicts and ambiguities. After two additional months of deliberation, wherein words and phrases were written, rewritten, moved, measured, associated, disassociated, evaluated and re-evaluated, there was a decided focus on producing a document, which could be accepted and agreed upon by all participants. APCO asserts that more important than mutually acceptable verbiage within the document, we lay the fundamental principles of service to the public that fell victim to compromise,” said a dissenting statement by Wanda McCarley, APCO acting president elect.
The focus of the seventh iteration of NRIC is wireless enhanced 911. This is the first time that public safety has been included on NRIC. The chair of NRIC VII is Timothy Donahue, chief executive officer of Nextel Communications Inc. It is the first time that a wireless company has chaired NRIC.
NRIC, made up of industry executives, has been meeting for more than a decade to collect data on and examine solutions to network outages. Its portfolio of issues has steadily increased and grown more important with the advent of homeland security.
The dispute between APCO and the rest of the NRIC working group centered on what geographic level should accuracy be measured. The subcommittee recommended location accuracy be measured at the state level, and that rural carriers meet the same accuracy as larger carriers serving their coverage areas.
“APCO remains puzzled by an assertion that there should be no expectation for the accountability of accuracy at the local level. For better or worse, Phase II services are requested at the local level, specifically at the public-safety answering point level. In most cases, contracts between wireless carriers and PSAPs are initiated at the local level. Phase II services are deployed at the local level. Phase II services are utilized at the local level and responses to calls are initiated at the local level by local authorities including fire, police and emergency medical services response units funded by local budgets. APCO asserts that accuracy testing should logically be conducted at the local level,” said McCarley.
The APCO position is not new. It submitted a petition for declaratory ruling Oct. 6 asking the FCC to require accuracy testing at the local community level.
APCO’s break seems to continue a recent trend of wanting to be the only voice of public safety and publicly disagreeing with other public-safety advocates. Recently, APCO sent a note to reporters covering a House telecommunications subcommittee hearing on Voice over Internet Protocol telling them public safety had not been invited, when a well-known public-safety advocate, but not speaking on behalf of APCO, was on the panel.
