Washington, DC – Advanced, interoperable communications for America’s first responders can be provided reliably, affordably and immediately by leveraging existing infrastructure and spectrum and by letting private sector innovation rise to the challenge, according to an expert who is testifying before Congress today.
In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Rear Admiral Robert F. Duncan (US Coast Guard, retired) describes how, in the days following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he noticed first responders often using commercial mobile devices to communicate instead of government-supplied systems.
“When I asked what they were doing, they told me they were ‘texting’ someone or doing some other activity that was not available to me on my government-supplied handset,” Duncan says. “It struck me that there must be a wide array of commercially available, off-the-shelf technologies that we could use to augment our existing capabilities.”
Now serving as senior vice president of government services for Rivada Networks, Duncan notes that public safety communications must meet higher standards of reliability, functionality, and resiliency than consumer services. The most rapid and affordable way to meet these requirements is by connecting special hardware and software to the existing infrastructure, rather than building an entirely new infrastructure, he says.
Rivada’s technology has been developed in recent years in partnership with US Northern Command, FEMA, the National Guard, and several private sector companies. It functions under existing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines and is in place in multiple locations across the USA, including: Alabama, California, Colorado. Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington. For example, the Louisiana National Guard is currently employing a Rivada Interoperable Communications Extension System (Rivada ICES), which it tested successfully during a hurricane preparedness exercise on April 5.
Duncan recommends that the FCC should not continue the approach used during the recent “D Block” airwaves auction, which was designed to entice a private sector company to build a new national network for interoperable public safety communications. “We need not, and cannot, embrace a regulatory approach which promises unclear capabilities at a distant time, and which will require massive investment in entirely new infrastructure, especially given the risk of creating a dependency on one commercial carrier,” Duncan says.
