A coalition of public safety groups charge that a Federal Communications Commission analysis of public safety wireless broadband needs suffers from flawed assumptions.

The coalition, the Public Safety Alliance--which is managed by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and whose members mainly are police and fire chief associations--released a July 7 paper to counter the FCC's earlier June 15 assertion that public safety's already allocated swatch of 10 megahertz within the 700 MHz band is sufficient to meet public safety needs for a national broadband wireless network.

Public safety groups have pushed to receive an additional 10 MHz in the 700 MHz band--the so-called D block--stating that only with the combined 20 MHz can plans for a national interoperable broadband first responder network be realized. The FCC plans on auctioning off the D block to the private sector with the provison that first responders gain priority access to the D block during emergencies.

The FCC, in its paper, argued that by deploying a sufficiently dense infrastructure of transmission towers, public safety could gain traffic capacity with its 10 MHz of spectrum that far exceed "the expectations of someone who has only experienced narrowband land mobile radio."

The Public Safety Alliance says that relying on transmission tower density fails as a solution, however, because local, state and federal law "often impede or stop the build-out of additional cell sites." A very dense infrastructure would also increase backhaul and operations and maintenance costs, as well as potentially causing transmission interference, the public safety paper states.

The new paper also argues that priority access to the D block during an emergency will not provide public safety with sufficient bandwidth, should their 10 MHz of spectrum become overloaded. Priority access does not pre-empt other traffic, meaning that public safety would gain access "to a network that is already congested."

Many public safety officials particularly want control over the D block because it is adjacent to public safety's existing 10 MHz license within the 700 MHz band. "Non-adjacent spectrum blocks of the same size as the D block will not provide as much throughput capacity, since greater efficiency is achieved through spectrum aggregation," the paper states.

For more:
- download the Public Safety Alliance paper (.pdf) and read the accompanying press release
- read the June 15 FCC analysis (.pdf)

Related Articles:
FCC: D block auction will make first responder network affordable 
FCC: 10 MHz is enough for public safety broadband network 
Q&A: APCO on the D block