Public Safety Advocate: Good News; From One-To-One to One-To-Many

FirstNet growth.?Recent addition of 33,400 new subscribers brings total to more than 4 million.

Pre-FirstNet. Push-To-Talk voice on Land Mobile Radio systems has been the mainstay of public safety voice/audio in the field. Now FirstNet provides two-way communications comparable to what smartphones have offered for many years.

One-to-many. FirstNet/broadband networks brought full-duplex voice. For the first time, newer radios enable LMR handhelds to cover different radio segments and include radio scanning, duplex for data, video, and text, and FirstNet users have full priority and preemption.

What’s Coming Next??Many people are skeptical that simplex communications over broadband will be as good as today’s simplex over LMR; Others believe FirstNet will replace all LMR systems in the U.S. and FirstNet will be the only public safety network in the U.S. The ultimate device for public safety will carry both LMR and FirstNet and will be capable of operating on both.

Winding down.?When public safety embarks on a mission, it has been successful even though it is not a rich lobbying group throwing money at congressional members.

Read the entire column here.