OEC: Initiatives and Their Impact on Emergency Communications 

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Emergency Communications has launched several initiatives to bolster interoperability in emergency communications.  This session was presented by a panel to discuss the impact these would have on public safety.  

The National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP) was updated in 2014 for broadband and NG9-1-1. The update includes adding LTE to the LMR world. The updates focus on interoperability of field services, programs and devices with the NG9-1-1 program and devices of the PSAPs.

The NECP is attempting to achieve interoperability at all levels of communications: local, state and national. Reviews of several planned events helps OEC evaluate the plan for quality. Areas of concern were voice, data and video. Events from 2010 to 2016 were compared to see if improvements were made and how it impacted operations.

Processes reviewed included planning, event specific, public alert and warning and WEA.

Cleveland, Ohio, discussed operations during the Republican National Convention, and a similar review of the operations was also completed.

The National Governors association (NGA) gave a briefing on their assistance in getting information from OEC to the state governments. The goal of the NGA is to assist with governance policies to promote OEC efforts.

SAFECOM was discussed as a program to help locals to achieve the interoperability required to reach their goals. A new survey will be conducted on the Federal Register to capture comments on SAFECOM.  

 

 

This session provided an overview of the public safety issues presently before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Deputy Chief Furth began with an update on 9-1-1 wireless location accuracy, describing a number of milestones in achieved within the last year. He then described the FCC’s role in the FirstNet state opt-out process, which consists of evaluating whether state alternative plans for a Radio Access Network meet the interoperability requirements of the law.  

 

Next, Furth discussed an investigation into a nationwide AT&T 9-1-1 outage that occurred in March 2017, noting that the FCC will hold a related workshop in September. Furth also provided updates on the FCC’s tracking of text-to-911 deployment, recent action to permit carriers to transition from TTY to Real-time Text (RTT) technologies, and the FCC’s annual report to Congress on 9-1-1 fee diversion.  Before closing, Furth mentioned several issues that are still pending at the FCC, such as the use of non-service initialized devices for emergency calls, public safety use of the 4.9 GHz band, and the 800 MHz spectrum rebanding process.