Public Safety Advocate

Fri Jun 3 11:46:14 2016

Any and all FirstNet RFP responses were to have been submitted by this past Tuesday. However, there seems to be some confusion over if and when FirstNet will release names of the bidders. I have spoken to several people who regularly submit RFPs to various federal agencies and have been told that the names but not the bidding prices are made public soon after the RFP due date. Even so, it appears from information I received third-hand that the Contracting Officer for the U.S. Department of the Interior is treating this differently and has thus far, I am told, stated that in this case the names of those submitting bids will not be released.

This should make for a very interesting PSCR meeting. Monday, June 6 is an open meeting of the Public Safety Advisory Committee (PSAC) and the PSCR event itself starts on Tuesday with the FirstNet Chairwoman, Sue Swenson, delivering the opening keynote address. I doubt if we will hear anything of substance relating to the RFP responses but you never can tell. Perhaps FirstNet will use this keynote to publically announce the bidders.

Meanwhile, it has been fun taking part in the many email, Twitter, and even voice conversations about who may be bidders. One should be Rivada Networks whose CEO supposedly announced it responded to the RFP early and is 100% compliant. While I have heard that statement from several sources, I have not seen it on the Internet so perhaps it was relayed to me in error. Be that as it may, the consensus is there were four bidders. I think there might be a couple more and would not be the least bit surprised if someone no one expected showed up. I hope more than four companies responded so FirstNet and the myriad of others who will be engaged in the process of selecting the best bid will have more choices and will select the one vendor that has taken the time to provide a response that is more about what the Public Safety community can expect from the network rather than how much money they think they will make using FirstNet’s spectrum on a secondary basis.

Next week should be a fun week in San Diego, I cannot wait to hear all of the rumors, discussions, and “insider” comments about the RFP responses. In reality the only thing that matters at this point is if FirstNet received more than a single response so there is some competition and proposals can be compared to find which one is in the best interests of the Public Safety community.

In the June issue of MissionCritical Communications I just received digitally, is the full article that appeared in an earlier email post. The article is entitled, “Rethinking FirstNet and LMR” and was written by John Facella, a good friend of mine who has been around in the Public Safety market for a long time. John is now a consultant and from time to time we work together on projects. I enjoyed reading his article because he discusses resetting FirstNet’s goals to those originally taken to Congress (before FirstNet) to build a nationwide data and video-only network leaving Land Mobile Radio intact, and letting the telephony and text traffic make use of the commercial carriers, at least until the First Responder community is accustomed to using the new network and learns its capabilities as well as its limitations. The article can be found here: http://rrmediagroup.com/Features/FeaturesDetails/FID/667

See some of you at PSCR in San Diego!

Andy Seybold

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