It's Not Just Open Standards, it's Open Spectrum

[Commentary] The problem of interconnecting communications services is not generally an open standards problem. It is an open spectrum problem -- and one we could solve today. Ever since 9/11, the communications world has known about the problems of interconnectivity among public safety services and the general public. Long ago, when radio was becoming a useful tool for public safety and not just for broadcasting, the FCC divided up the spectrum into little slices and gave them out by service. Thus, “firefighters” got a slice of spectrum, “police” got another, “forest rangers” a third, etc. This seems nuts today, but at the time it made sense. Most of the time, firefighters and police officers don't need to communicate by radio. In the old days of primitive radios and powerful transmitters, there was fear that police radios and firefighter radios on the same band would interfere with each other. So the FCC put them on separate bands and relied on the stationary command centers (the fire house and the police station) to communicate with each other and then re- transmit to the units of their forces that needed to coordinate. While this did not allow instantaneous coordination between units on the scene, this was felt to be a reasonable trade off against the risk of regular interference, police responding to fire calls, etc. Unfortunately, we are now living in a world where each service has its own special type of highly expensive (because economies of scale never kick in) radio on its own frequency. It's not just open standards, the radios simply cannot communicate with each other because they do not send or receive on the same frequencies. The second problem is overwhelming existing infrastructure by civilians and triaging civilian use with emergency use. Even in 9/11, when cell sites (other than those on the Towers) were not destroyed, the sheer volume of civilians trying to call each other overwhelmed the system (although text-messaging, which uses much less bandwidth, worked better). Public safety folks want a way to take over that bandwidth if needed. At the same time, however, you don't want to cut off the civilian population completely from telecom services. Civilians need to coordinate with each other to ease evacuation, locate missing relatives, or even report new developments to authorities. Finally, there is the problem of replacing critical infrastructure when it gets destroyed. Radio isn't magic, and communications systems designed around a particular architecture, like cellular, will not work with a different sort of architecture. For years, open spectrum advocates have touted the virtues of “smart radios.” Using existing technology, a radio can scan the spectrum for usable bands, find the receivers that should receive the messages, and use the unused bands to send the message. The receivers ignore incoming signals unless they are tagged to attract attention, in which case they tune in. But the FCC's rules prohibit all but the most primitive “smart radios.” The FCC prohibits the sort of frequency hopping described above. In fact, to get a device approved for operation, you need to show the FCC's engineers that the device will not broadcast out of band, and that you have taken steps to prevent others from tampering with the device to make it operate out of its assigned band.
[SOURCE: Tales from the Sausage Factory, AUTHOR: Harold Feld]