State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Building the public safety communications network

American City and County: Congress created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) more than four ago and provided it with $7 billion to build and operate a nationwide financially self-sustaining public-safety broadband network (NPSBN).

On May 31, multiple teams of vendors submitted bids in response to the FirstNet request for proposals (RFP), which requires the winning contractor to deploy a public-safety-grade wireless system using LTE to operate the network. The contractor would also make annual payments to FirstNet totaling at least $5.625 billion over 25 years to fund FirstNet’s ongoing operations and to pay for network upgrades, such as when the system migrates to 5G technology.

Following is a Q&A describing why FirstNet implementation’s is important to cities and counties.

Read article