Whether Verizon and FirstNet—the nationwide public-safety network being built by AT&T—should support secure interoperability between subscribers of both systems was the topic of a spirited debate yesterday at IWCE 2019 between consultants who work with Verizon and AT&T.
In building FirstNet, AT&T established a physically separate LTE core to manage FirstNet subscriber traffic, providing public-safety users with priority and preemption rights over commercial traffic across AT&T’s network, including all of its existing LTE spectrum bands. Verizon has said it will match FirstNet functionality, providing priority and preemption through a virtual public-safety LTE core on its broadband network.
FirstNet and Verizon users have the ability to have basic interoperability when network capacity is not an issue, but Verizon wants the FirstNet system to recognize Verizon public-safety customers’ priority and preemption when communicating with a FirstNet user, according to Robert LeGrande, CEO of The Digital Decision who consults with Verizon.
This reciprocal recognition of priority and preemption rights is different than the core-to-core interoperability that some Verizon initially sought and was depicted in a slide that was displayed as part of LeGrande’s presentation during a three-hour IWCE session about selecting a broadband carrier.
“I know that graphic is somewhat misleading, because it suggests that it’s a core-to-core connection. But it actually isn’t,” LeGrande said during the panel yesterday. “All it is, is each carrier recognizing the priority protocols and respecting the priority protocols that are set up on individual networks.
“If you’re FirstNet AT&T, and I send you a message—there still is interoperability at the carrier level … you can do that now. It’s the care of the messaging when it comes across, and [each carrier] recognizing that it’s coming from a first responder and, therefore, will get different treatment on [the other carrier’s] network. That ensures that public-safety communications have priority and preemption—no matter what network they’re on—during a time of crisis.”
“That’s not an unreasonable request, nor does it require core-to-core interoperability. Nobody’s looking to get access to FirstNet’s core in that model; it’s just passing the priority-and-preemption protocols back and forth.”
Without such recognition of priority-and-preemption rights, there is a possibility that first responders subscribing to different carriers may not be able communicate with each other in times of crisis—when network congestion is heaviest and prioritized access is most needed, LeGrande said.
“What I’m asking is to leverage these things—not to give [AT&T] an advantage, not to give Verizon an advantage,” he said. “But, at the scene, make sure that we’re not withholding capabilities for communication when we’re at the scene. Build the best thing on the right, build the best thing on the left, but don’t compete at the scene.”
By Donny Jackson, IWCE’s Urgent Communications Editor
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March 6, 2019
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