The public safety community is not happy with the FCC. Specifically, they take issue with the commission’s recommendation in the broadband plan to auction off the D-Block for commercial use, with the caveat that public safety agencies have access to the band “when necessary.”

Representatives from the nation’s leading public safety associations say this undermines their attempts to create a nationwide network – a network that will allow them to communicate seamlessly with each other in times of disaster.

After talking with the FCC, public safety insiders and experts from the wireless industry, I’m inclined to agree. 

As it stands today, public safety agencies use a fragmented array of frequency bands and the vast majority of the two-way radios they use are built for a very narrow piece of spectrum.

In the commercial sector, this would translate to subscribers carrying around several different devices at the same time to communicate with each other. This would never pass with operators or consumers and poses serious threats to the safety of the public in times of emergency. 

Unfortunately, I believe that the FCC’s plan for the D-Block leaves public safety agencies short of the spectrum they need to solve this interoperability crisis. 

Robert Dowd, a member of the Major Cities Chiefs Association and deputy chief for the New York City Police Department, put it best during a March speech at the International Wireless Communications Expo: The government can give police and emergency responders “all the money in the world… but if we don’t have enough spectrum, we can’t do our job.”

As it stands under the FCC’s broadband plan, public safety agencies have 10 MHz of their own D-Block spectrum and another contiguous 10 MHz of spectrum that will be shared with commercial LTE networks for back-up in times of crisis. 

Public safety wants to run massive, technologically advanced, mission-critical applications over the LTE network that will eventually be built in that band. Think about it: A hurricane hits. Police, firefighters and emergency responders rush to the scene using video, voice and data to communicate. Will a mere 10 MHz be enough to handle it?

The public safety community doesn’t think so, and they also doubt that the commercial-grade networks they’re supposed to use for emergency backup will withstand such a test. 

Public safety employees won’t be like the average subscriber. They’ll be data hogs on an unprecedented scale. 

“Public safety users will be ‘superusers.’ They have a need to leverage technology to the highest extent possible to save lives… We have to assume they will use the most advanced applications available,” says Robert LeGrande II, former chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. 

LeGrande knows a thing or two about public safety networks. He was instrumental in a project that would have built out a 700 MHz public safety network in Washington, D.C., if the FCC’s 2008 D-Block auction hadn’t put the breaks on the project.

Like the vast majority of the public safety community, LeGrande doubts commercial networks would be robust enough for public safety applications during a crisis. “In a world with just 10 MHz of our own spectrum, our concern is that we’ll depend on them and they won’t be at the level where we need them,” he says.

When I talked to the FCC about this, a spokesperson dismissed the concerns and criticism coming from the pubic safety sector. His answer was this: The spectrum allocated for public safety under the broadband plan will be “adequate when you build [the public safety network] with redundancies on the commercial side.”

I just don’t buy it, and neither do the men and women who work every day to protect the lives of citizens. Public safety should get 20 MHz of prime real estate in the 700 MHz band all to themselves.