FCC Public Safety Chief Stresses Urgency of Emergency Network

摘要

"We have a brief technological window" to build a national public safety network using 700 MHz spectrum, FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief James Barnett said at a New America Foundation forum: "There’s an urgency to this." Roaming is a critical feature of the network, Barnett said. "It provides more resiliency and redundancy than we can have in a single public safety network alone," he said. "Recently, the public safety network in Washington, D.C., went down for a number of hours. It would have been great if they could have roamed onto commercial networks and continued to operate." Priority access is also critical, Barnett said. "This is the new world, a broadband, packet-switched world where when ... you give it priority the packets start flowing immediately."