AT&T gets $6.5B contract to build US-wide public safety network | Hacker News Reader

AT&T gets $6.5B contract to build US-wide public safety network

arstechnica.com

65 pointsjonbaer41 comments

So basically they're building a second internet / wireless communication network, which only the government has access to?

Well this way in case of unrest I guess they can temporarily shut down the internet and other communication networks completely and yet still be connected to each other.

Most agencies already use the internet with VPN's and the cell system. This will give them a dedicated LTE radio band but I think the towers and backhaul to inet are the same with some sort of prioritization.

If you are the skeptical of the government type though it is true they could shut down the public bands and keep band 14 up. Probably not though, they will just just get backhaul priority and the public bands will be jammed up if something bad happens.

They are probably building the base network for $6B.

New York tried (and failed) to build a similar network in the early 2000s... and the cost was supposed to be like $2B. For the whole country... that's easily a $100B project.

There's a lot more to this than just having "another internet". They need to be able to collaborate with multiple jurisdictions, handle overlap between jurisdictions (i.e., State Highway Patrol, County Sheriff, city PD, various federal agencies, from GSA and VA police to the FBI), hook into other radio systems, etc.

There are already systems in place to allow essential communications to take place during crises on the public networks. People get issued an ID number that will give their call priority.

Or if an adversary takes down the internet, our government isn't left unable to function.

"Taking down the internet" would require some really extreme methods, on the order of EMPing large swathes of the US. It's unlikely that anything less would seriously disrupt government comms for more than a day or so.

If this network is actually going to be resistant to "taking down", they could have just as effectively used this money to upgrade the public internet backbone as needed.

Recalling stories like [0] or the recent "internet of things" exploits doesn't make me so sure that it would be as hard as you think.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-pakistan-knocked-youtube-offli...

"...which only the government has access to..."

for about 48 hours...

This isnt that, for 6b dollars, you're unlikely to cover more than a handful of major metros, figure its 250k for a greenfield site, 100k for a co-located one, plus associated core network costs, for a national network you'd be looking at more like 100b+.

Beyond that, most communications between the field and dispatch is narrowband, not wideband, and this is unlikely to change in the near future - if you think the police agencies are relying on public internet access now to do mission critical dispatch, you'd be wrong.

The cynic inside me wants to say that this "$6.5B" is destined to inflate.

Who is leading the field on the matter of staying connected in the event of civil unrest?

Final-mile mesh networks, with locally hosted services, seem like an obvious safety measure. Is anybody doing this?

"FirstNet will provide 20MHz of high-value, telecommunications spectrum and success-based payments of $6.5 billion over the next five years to support the network buildout"

I only had to read that 4 times to figure it out. Let's call it a relatively well-written government press release.

This is probably a dumb question, but if they usually share the same network, isn't there some way to give emergency responders priority?

I hope I'm not fear mongering, but I can't say I'm looking forward to the potential influx of IoT devices. As I understand it, many IoT devices appear to be highly vulnerable to hacking. Vendor lock-in and flimsy security requirements don't sound like a good mix.

Yes they can prioritize on the public bands as shown with the new unlimited plans that deprioritize users with over 22 gigs in a month if on a busy tower. However still nothing better than a dedcated radio band that standard public modems can't even see, but being in the 700 mhz range will limits its speed. LTE-A equipment does carrier aggregation too using multiple bands at once for faster speed, not sure how FirstNet modems will work with that, if at all since its a single band.

There is, but the effect isn't as good; you'll still get channel congestion from non-prioritized control traffic, and hidden-terminal issues where devices don't know there's a public-safety communication on the band.

Plus this makes it less likely for accidentally or deliberately non-compliant devices to jam communications.

Yes! the little-known 710-NCS-GETS phone number. It's the only phone number in the 710 area code.

If you dial that number and then enter in your special 12 digit security code, you can make an outbound call to any other number.

All the telephone switches in the US are required to treat calls to the 710 area code as priority, at the expense of dropping any existing traffic that it needs to drop.

The end result is even overloaded exchanges can be used by first responders with the proper security codes. "GETS is designed to provide a 90% call completion rate when call volume is eight times normal capacity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommu...

That's a different implementation from DoD's classic AUTOVON system, which used phones with the "missing" four DTMF tones to assign priority. "Flash Override" was pretty much restricted to National Command Authority (the President and Joint Chiefs) and would allegedly clear entire trunk lines to ensure call completion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon

Telstra is apparently doing this in Australia but the full technical details I did not find. But it's basically an add-on within their existing network: http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/telstra-l...

Interesting that it's the US-wide one; there are local and regional safety systems, too, which are heavily bid up by folks including Motorola.

Here in Seattle ever few years we approve another quarter billion dollar emergency network project. If our local cost is a quarter billion, $6.5B for a country-wide network seems like a deal in this day and age.

(Article - http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/eastside/levy-passe...)

This is not typical public safety trunked radio stuff that Motorola usually does.

This is basically a special LTE band (14 - 760mhz down, 790mhz up). Standard LTE tech using one of the lower frequency bands for better range and penetration but lower speed. Also the public safety modems in device will go up to 1 watt transmit instead of just 300 milliwatts of your typical LTE device.

Most public safety agencies in US already using cell networks heavily for their in vehicle laptop / dispatch systems having contracts with Verizon or ATT this will just give them a dedicated band the public isn't using so it should stay up better even when the rest of the cell system is hammered due to a unexpected event. Probably includes dedicated backhaul bandwidth from the towers and static ip's for devices etc.

Interesting note you can get a legal LTE booster that goes to 1 watt transmit to match FirstNet transmit power.

Cradlepoint already has a FirstNet modem, thier routers are used in public safety vehicles already along with Sierra Wireless and Pepwave: https://cradlepoint.com/content/whats-new/band-14-module-pub...

The spectrum for this has been set aside for a while; it's just not used until now.

I wonder how AT&T lobbied over the other companies to win the contract.

I would assume they were the lowest bidder.

Or paid the right people the most in campaign contributions.

There's a reason procurement decisions like this are delegated to career civil servants - they have much fewer valid excuses to be socializing with vendors.

Corruption in this context usually instead takes the form of job offers post-retirement; and that's usually most common in military procurement, where early retirement from public service is the norm.

this is why that lobbyists and bureaucrats go through a revolving door

they go from government to private sector to government again

like Comey

>There's a reason procurement decisions like this are delegated to career civil servants - they have much fewer valid excuses to be socializing with vendors.

This is simply false. Regular Capture and the revolving door are rampant at telecommunications companies

Evidence?

It was a well known, public RFP. Several teams responded. It's unlikely that AT&T won the award for any reason other than how their proposal was scored.

How much more would it cost extra to set out a duplicate network?

6.5 bil to cover the entire nation sounds low. I think the price will end up being more. I wonder who will responsible for overages.

Pretty sure just using existing ATT cell network with new dedicated LTE band and prioritization on backhaul to internet.

That's what I'm thinking too. They are probably going to feature a couple of notable big-press dig hole events and show some equipment, but in the end this is a set of code changes and specialized devices that will emit a new code that gets special priority. Total cost to AT&T: a few million. We all paid taxes for that..

> Total cost to AT&T: a few million

More like a few billion. A few million dollars is nothing in telecom. They've almost certainly already spent at least that much just to bid on the project. The upgrades will include things like structural re-enforcement of towers, increased battery / generator capacity, security enhancements, etc.

That's assuming all their equipment supports 700mhz. They might need to add antennas, front circuitry etc. They also probably need to do a lot of testing to validate it works. All this is not cheap.

$6.5B is just the first part of it. From the article:

> AT&T's contract with FirstNet is 25 years long. "AT&T will spend about $40 billion over the life of the contract to build, deploy, operate and maintain the network...

What's the theoretical max throughput of 20MHz of spectrum?

Depends on the power they push signal through vs. the noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...

Not to mention effects of distance...

FirstNet Band 14 LTE is very similar to other public 700Mhz LTE bands with 20 Mhz of bandwidth.

The modems will be CAT 3 LTE devices with 100Mbps down / 50Mbps up initially. Beyond that speed you start needing to do carrier aggregation with multiple bands with current 4G LTE tech.

Cat 5 can do 300 Mbps though theoretically but requires 4x4 MIMO and the towers and devices are 2x2 MIMO currently. Most phones now are Cat 6 300Mbps using two 20Mhz channels with aggregation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-UTRA

The US is a genocidal state and has been one since it began. Any technologists working for the state are complicit in genocide.

What?

As an EMT who may some day use this, I respectfully disagree. This network is for first responders, not some arm of the military. This sort of system will be used to respond to terrorist attacks, not support them. It will literally be used to save lives.

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