Communication interoperabilityPublic safety networks still can not communicate with each other
Two decades after the initiation of the effort to bring about communication interoperability among public safety personnel, the lack of standards continues to hobble the campaign; Project 25, launched twenty-one years ago, was supposed to develop standards that would let police, firefighters, and other first responders communicate across departmental and jurisdictional lines using equipment from various manufacturers
A lack of technical standards is hobbling deployment of interoperable public safety networks despite more than two decades of work on a suite of interoperability standards, according to Dereck Orr, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) program manager for Public Safety Communications Systems.
FCW’s William Jackson writes that Orr testified before the House Science and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, at a hearing on the status of Project 25, a 21-year-old effort to develop standards that would let police, firefighters, and other first responders communicate across departmental and jurisdictional lines using equipment from various manufacturers.
P25 is a suite of standards that specify the eight open interfaces between the various components of a land mobile radio system, Orr said. “To date, only the conventional portions of the Command Air Interface and the Inter-RF-Subsystem Interface have a completed suite of documents,” Orr said. The more complex trunked CAI continues to lack conformance test documents although trunked CAI products have been sold for almost a decade, he added.
“The remainder of the six interfaces are in various states of document completion. Therefore, since its inception in 1989, one-and-a-half of the eight interfaces have been completed,” he said.
Standards-making is a consensus-based process to ensure broad buy-in from industry, said David Boyd, director of DHS’s Command, Control and Interoperability Division of the Science and Technology Directorate. “The need for consensus throughout this effort often sets the pace for how quickly they are completed,” Boyd said.
“Some not involved in the standards development process might comment that standards development takes a long time,” said Ernest Hofmeister, senior scientist in the Public Safety and Professional Communications area for Harris Corporation. “The standards are developed by top engineers from industry who have the knowledge and perspective to assure successful product implementation to the standard. Getting to consensus and developing the requisite detail of the standard takes time, but the resultant standard product is technically solid and long lasting.”
Jackson quotes John Muench, director of business development for radio manufacturer Motorola, Inc., to say that this lack of completed standards has not stopped deployment of P25 networks, however. “Since the P25 standard was first adopted by the [Federal Communications Commission] in 2001, 36 states have deployed statewide P25 networks, as have 165 cities and counties,” Muench said “Nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population is covered by a P25 public safety network.”
This, however, does not ensure interoperability. “A few
