All 50 States Vote Yes On AT&T’s $40 Billion Emergency Response Network FirstNet

Megalith

Megalith

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AT&T will be providing dedicated broadband to first responders throughout the country: all 50 states, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, have opted into the company’s FirstNet program for universal emergency response communications. It’s considered a big win for AT&T, as the deal has effectively granted them prized LTE spectrum.

For AT&T, the victory provides a new source of revenue from local police and fire departments, who will presumably come to rely on FirstNet for their emergency communications. It also gets a serious boost in its spectrum, along with free cash from taxpayers. But for all of us, it seems billions of dollars will be spent to create a specialist comm channel, when existing technologies are more than up to the task of providing these highly reliable services.
 
I really like the vision driving the idea.

Not a fan of the centralization from the systems engineering perspective, but - it's better than nothing.

Hope the actual architecture can be implemented in a decentralized manner.
 
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I remember reading about the Rural Broadband Subsidy program a while back.

From the article:
Second, we already heavily subsidize rural broadband. The Connect America Fund (CAF), run by the Federal Communications Commission, subsidizes rural Internet Service Providers to the tune of $4.5 billion per year. Since 1995 the program has spent $84 billion in real dollars subsidizing rural telecommunications providers. In addition, the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utility Service (RUS) has given out another $7 billion since 2009 in grants and loans for telecom programs. The National Telecommunications and Information Agency gave away another $4 billion as part of the 2009 stimulus package. Policymakers might ask what we've gotten from that nearly $100 billion.
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Would be nice if we could divert some of that to fund this thing.
 
SparkedFire said:
If it's anything like the LTE coverage in my area, good luck when you need it most.
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You missed the highly reliable comment. I live in West Texas (100 miles from Big Bend National Park). All it takes is one person operating a backhoe 200 miles away from here and our town loses ATT.
No cell phone, home phone, internet, or 911.
This has happened twice in the last 3 months.
Since they got the contract are they going to rehire the folks that just got layed off?
 
Spaceninja said:
So they will take the spectrum, the cash, maybe some tax breaks and do nothing for 25 years?
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My thoughts exactly. Not the first time money was taken from tax payers and nothing good came from it. Don't see why this should be any different.
 
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atp1916 said:
I remember reading about the Rural Broadband Subsidy program a while back.

From the article:


Would be nice if we could divert some of that to fund this thing.
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all that money is gone and nothing was actually done with it.. rural areas still don't have the 1995 equivalent(384/384 dsl minimum) of broadband access 22 years later.. AT&T after taking the money deemed it was to expensive to actually provide so they didn't do it with zero stipulation in the grants that they actually had to spend the money.. i'm not happy that a major broadband company actually got this contract unless there's miles of red tape holding AT&T responsible with jail time if the system goes down for even X amount of seconds.
 
Maybe, just maybe, it's a good thing.

We are all rightfully cynical about everything these days, it would be just wonderful to have a company do something that was actually altruistic.
 
Hopefully it isn't setup like the TMR2 up here in Canada - Bell servers took a shit earlier this year over a underground substation transformer blowing up and knocked out PS comms for a good swath of the country (and as far as I know the lack of redundancy issue hasn't been fixed). Now if your military or FBI has any input into this there will be redundancies put into AT&T's internal infrastructure to support this.
 
donald_k said:
Hopefully it isn't setup like the TMR2 up here in Canada - Bell servers took a shit earlier this year over a underground substation transformer blowing up and knocked out PS comms for a good swath of the country (and as far as I know the lack of redundancy issue hasn't been fixed). Now if your military or FBI has any input into this there will be redundancies put into AT&T's internal infrastructure to support this.
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I wouldn't count on the current FBI caring about doing anything worthwhile. They are too busy making up human feces to try to get rid of Trump
 
Sure, lets put all our eggs in one basket, what could go wrong?
 
GNUse_the_force said:
Im no expert on egg baskets per say, but id imagine if you sufficiently designed the basket to carry the appropriate amount of eggs then not much.
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But the HR droid hired the person carrying the eggs. And the carriers path is made by the lowest bidder.

Them eggs better be swattled in 40 billion cloth.
 
Isps are the worst. They never do anything right with out the government stepping in with regulations or laws.
 
atp1916 said:
I really like the vision driving the idea.

Not a fan of the centralization from the systems engineering perspective, but - it's better than nothing.

Hope the actual architecture can be implemented in a decentralized manner.
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Spaceninja said:
So they will take the spectrum, the cash, maybe some tax breaks and do nothing for 25 years?
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Bigbacon said:
AT&T laughing to bank i bet on this one.
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Wyodiver said:
Maybe, just maybe, it's a good thing.

We are all rightfully cynical about everything these days, it would be just wonderful to have a company do something that was actually altruistic.
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AT&T and the other telecomms took $400 Billion from tax payers to build-up their infrastructure and did nothing with it. They used every loophole possible so that they didn't have to do anything. And now if that wasn't enough, this is the only reason AT&T is doing this:

"For AT&T, the victory provides a new source of revenue from local police and fire departments, who will presumably come to rely on FirstNet for their emergency communications. It also gets a serious boost in its spectrum, along with free cash from taxpayers."
 
Well, fuck.

And if NN is fully repealed, would there be anything stopping ATT customers getting priority when calling busy services?
 
I like how it says they won the contract. Is there another ISP that has the authority to do this across all 50 states? Not even Comcast is in every state is it?
 
Wyodiver said:
Maybe, just maybe, it's a good thing.

We are all rightfully cynical about everything these days, it would be just wonderful to have a company do something that was actually altruistic.
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Since when is a $40B contract plus free spectrum altruistic? Companies compete for govt contracts because they make money. Given that this is a govt contract, the real cost is likely at least double. A "fair" profit margin on such contracts is often around 10%, but can vary. ATT stands to make at least several hundred million dollars off this.

The capability is desperately needed though, so I hope it will be a well run program.
 
If it means they have to run more than one fiber cables into my area Im all for it, right now if it goes down so does half the county including 911.
 
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