The Broadband Needs of Public Safety

In comments filed at the Federal Communications Commission to inform the National Broadband Plan, the Public Safety Spectrum Trust Corporation says the only practical option for public safety to access broadband today is through the use of the publicly offered 3G commercial networks. Although there are a limited number of other options, such as municipal Wi-Fi (unlicensed) networks or mesh networks, these networks are few and far between. Public safety is accessing the Internet, private networks, and databases using these services where available, but the services lack key features such as mission-critical redundancy, reliability, public safety priority, data security, and wide-area nationwide coverage. They are also generally unavailable in many rural areas. The data rate requirements for public safety are fairly straightforward. The faster the data rates, the better for public safety in the performance of their mission critical duties. The PSST expects that technology will continue to advance and data rates will continue to improve, which will be very good for public safety. However, past experience with both public safety systems and commercial systems has shown that the demand for services usually grows faster than the speed of improvements in technology. In regards to Quality of Service ("QoS") issues, public safety needs much higher QoS than what is offered today by commercial services providers.