FirstNet President TJ Kennedy opened Thursday’s session at the 2016 CCA Mobile Carriers Show with a fact-filled update, delivered with the energy and gusto of a first responder, a position he held in a variety of ways previously, including as a state trooper and a flight paramedic. He said the national safety network would be “a three-year build out. We know public safety needs this immediately. It is a very aggressive schedule; there are a lot of things on our roadmap. Over the next two years we will be even much quicker than some people want us to move. In the past year people have asked ‘can you go quicker.’ Now we are on the other side of the house where people are saying ‘you are moving very quickly but we are just catching up with you.’”
By May 31, Kennedy expects final proposals on the table from multiple different partners who want to be sure this network will be successful. Winners will be selected by the end of the year, he believes.
Kennedy opened his address by stressing to carriers “connectivity is a quality of life issue to most public safety first responders around this country. It is a life and death issue. And that is why FirstNet was created. It is the reason why public safety across this country — police officers, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, all got together, all went to Capitol Hill for a number of years to make sure they could get access to the spectrum across the country and the appropriate funding that they needed to make sure this network would not only get deployed, that this network will survive for eternity and that it would actually provide the kinds of upgraded and recapitalized services that public safety needs. Just like you look at a roadmap going into 5G and into 6G and into the future.”
“Across the world today, every country is working with the same kind of conundrum. How do we move public safety to the same kinds of tools and technologies that the average 15 year old has at their fingertips today? And in most communities we don’t have those same tools for police officers and firefighters.”
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