Emergency communicationPublic safety networks coped better with Sandy than commercial networks

Published 3 December 2012

A new nationwide Long Term Evolution (LTE) network for first responders will be built under the supervision of the First Responder Authority (FirstNet); this network will be an improvement over the commercial networks that experienced outages during Hurricane Sandy

A new nationwide Long Term Evolution (LTE) network for first responders will be built under the supervision of the First Responder Authority (FirstNet). This network will be an improvement over the commercial networks that experienced outages during the storm.

Urgent Communicationreports that last week the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reported that 25 percent of the commercial cell sites in the area affected by Hurricane Sandy are still not operational, and the percentage of cell site outages was less than 9 percent, according to a statement from David Turetsky chief of the agency’s public safety and homeland security bureau.

William Brownlow, the telecommunications manager for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) said that early indications from state departments of transportation show that affected areas have been able to keep communications running in the aftermath of Sandy.

Bronlow also said that public safety Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems have remained operational, mostly because LMR towers have been hardened to handle extreme conditions, with generators providing backup power if the commercial electric grid goes down.

“The general takeaway from this is that public safety’s requirements are not the same as commercial providers — the need for backup generators is absolutely crucial,” Brownlow told Urgent Communications. “I think that’s the message that needs to be made clear to FirstNet.”

In New Hampshire, the DOT had seven of its eighteen sites running on backup power, Brownlow said. Getting additional fuel to some of the generations was a primary issue and a microwave antenna need to be realigned, but the issues were solved within twelve hours.

Brownlow said that in New York there were no significant issues.

“They were using the talkaround feature on radio, which you cannot do on a cell phone,” Brownlow told Urgent Communications.

Most commercial wireless providers have backup power set up at key sites in their networks, but to provide backup power to all sites is unproductive and expensive to maintain and diesel generators are not allowed on most rooftops, where many cell sites are located.

“The sites built on buildings are the most vulnerable, as opposed to the ones built on towers, for two reasons,” mobile wireless consultant Andrew Seybold told Urgent Communications. “Number one, buildings don’t withstand 100-mph winds the way towers do. Number two, you can’t put a generator on the roof, so you put a generator on the ground or in the basement, and it floods.”

Discussions have taken place about increasing reliability to first responders by also including network access to multiple commercial carriers, hoping that one of them has an operational system.

“Most of the towers that failed had two or three [commercial] operators on them,” Seybold said. “So, even FirstNet’s plan of multiple network operators in a given phone would not have helped the situation.”