After five long years of fighting in the halls of Congress for the right to build and operate their own nationwide wireless network, loosely confederated groups of firefighters and police from jurisdictions all over the nation finally emerged victorious last year. Congress in the 2012 Tax Relief Act granted a highly coveted block of radio spectrum to public safety agencies for their exclusive use, and threw in $7 billion to help kickstart the effort. Now comes the hard part: actually building it. A country the size of the United States has never taken on the monumental job of creating a fully integrated national wireless network, said Craig Farrill, acting chief technical officer and board member of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), which is the organization tasked with creating the system. Even the commercial wireless providers didn't do it. Today's T-Mobiles, AT&Ts and the like took some 25 years to build out their networks, and did so mostly by one company acquiring others, Farrill said at a recent presentation to first responders in Arlington, Va.
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