When anything significant takes place in the wireless industry that will affect the Public Safety community, Andrew Seybold can be counted on to take a hard look at it and then provide readers with straight answers about the promise, the reality, and the hype. He is Public Safety's Advocate before the FCC and the commercial wireless industry.
Deeply involved in the Public Safety community, he brings to his advocacy experiences gained over 40 years as a first responder, commercial vendor, consultant, writer, and educator as well as a grounding in the emerging world of wireless broadband communications.
When the noise level reaches a fever pitch, look to Andrew Seybold to provide a voice of reason that clarifies complex issues and provides invaluable insight that can be acted upon.
As we begin 2012, an election year, the Public Safety community remains solidified in its desire for the proper legislation to be passed. The issue of the reallocation of the D Block to Public Safety has now been addressed by both Houses of Congress and by both parties within both houses. However, there still remain some differences between what the Senate has proposed in S911 and what the House majority leadership is promoting. more
This requirement that is contained in the bill presently in the House would, in reality, cripple the Public Safety community and negate all of the progress that has been made toward interoperable voice communications over the past ten years more
It is difficult for those who created the Internet and grew up with its influence to understand that there are several types of communications with needs that cannot be met simply by embracing the premise that the Internet and IP-based packet systems can solve everyone’s needs all of the time. more
It has always been the vision of the Public Safety Community to work with commercial wireless network operators to provide off-loading of non-emergency traffic onto commercial networks when needed, and to further work with commercial network operators with cell site sharing and even network backhaul more
Introduction The D Block, (758-763 MHz and 788-793 MHz) is the 10 MHz of spectrum (5MHz X 5 MHz) that sits next to the Public [...] more
Ten years after 9/11, there is no excuse for not providing the Public Safety community with the tools it needs to better serve all of us. This becomes even more important when the Public Safety community has seen layoffs at a local level because of a lack of funding. Doing more with less takes the right tools, and in this case the right tool is a robust Public Safety-only broadband network that has 20 MHz of spectrum available. more
Do not ignore continued investment in existing mission-critical analog and P25 voice systems because you believe voice over LTE broadband that is mission-critical is just around the corner. Many elected officials in federal, state, and local agencies seem to believe this so continued investment in existing channelized voice systems is not needed more
IF LTE broadband can meet both the voice and the data requirements of the first responder community, a single device could be deployed that would provide not only data/video interoperability, but voice interoperability as well. This would be an ideal situation and one that is worth pursing. However, existing narrowband spectrum should not be reallocated for other uses until such time as LTE broadband can and does meet all of the requirements for Public Safety mission critical voice as well as data and video services. more
On March 18, 2011, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is a part of the Library of Congress, submitted a memorandum that has been used [...] more
Another lesson from these tests is that when the network was overloaded, that is, we tried to push more data and video over the system than it could handle, not only was the last data or video unusable, it also rendered existing data and video transmissions that were already in use unusable or at least unstable.
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