Outreach News - IMPORTANT 800 MHz Channel Opening Window Information Included

National Public Safety Telecommunications Council
Be a Part of the Exciting Future of Broadband

The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) needs you for three new exciting projects in broadband. Earlier this year NPSTC's Broadband Working Group (BBWG) completed a functional definition of mission-critical voice requirements for broadband, under review now.

NOVES: The BBWG, working with the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Program, is participating in the 3GPP standards development upon which LTE is based. Part of this work focuses on NOVES, or non-voice emergency services. Although the current scope of this work is non-voice communications between a consumer and a PSAP, the standards developed out of this work will be highly relevant for non-voice communications between public safety users and dispatch or other public safety entities. The BBWG is adding a NOVES Task Group to provide public safety input into this active effort.

Priority and Quality of Service: Priority and quality of service functionality is built into LTE standards. To help set expectations among the user community, as well as ensure standards-based solutions for these areas, we need to start looking at public safety's requirements in these areas, potentially expanding what was covered in the 2007 Statement of Requirements (SoR). Recent discussions have included the development and standardization of a framework for each topic that would be based on National Incident Management System (NIMS) /Incident Command System (ICS).

State/Local Control of Network: There has been a lot of discussion on ensuring that state/local public safety users maintain adequate "control" over the broadband network during an incident. The BBWG would like to develop a definition similar to the mission-critical voice definition for state/local broadband control during an incident. As with mission-critical voice, it isn't clear that everyone has the same understanding of what control means and what public safety really wants or needs to be able to do to the network during an ongoing incident. We need to define what control really means.

If you have an interest in any or all of these important issues, please contact BBWG Chair, Andrew Thiessen at andrew@its.bldrdoc.gov to volunteer.

NPSTC is a federation of organizations whose mission is to improve public safety communications and interoperability through collaborative leadership.