U.S. House of Representatives: Committee on Energy and Commerce, Republicans Prepared Witness Testimony: Jacknis, Norman J.

Prepared Witness Testimony

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
June 11, 2003
11:00 AM
2322 Rayburn House Office Building

Mr. Chairman, Fred Upton, Ranking Member, Edward J. Markey, Westchester's own Representative, Eliot Engel and other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for holding these hearings on the radio spectrum needs of first responders.

I am the Chief Information Officer for Westchester County - the commissioner in charge of the County Government's technology and telecommunications. This includes the 911 system, the systems for dispatching fire and EMS units, radios and other forms of wireless communications, emergency management systems, emergency notification systems, the bioterrorism early warning system, and so on.

With a population of about 950,000 people, two active nuclear reactors, New York City's water supply, corporate headquarters for several fortune 500 companies among other possible locations of a disastrous incident, Westchester County is as good a place as any to understand the potential impact of the radio spectrum deficit facing public safety and emergency workers. As a suburban county, just north of New York City, we demonstrate the kinds of communications issues that arise in the handling of incidents - both large and small - that do not limit themselves neatly to one side of a municipal border.

Westchester County also offers, in microcosm, the common picture of multiple first response agencies. In addition to the County Government's special services in Hazmat, bomb squad, fire training and the like, Westchester has more than forty other police departments, fifty-eight local fire departments (comprised of career, volunteer firefighters or a combination of the two), forty-two emergency medical service agencies, and more than fifty public safety answering points in our 911 system. Day-to-day, the County Government ensures that the communications network underlying these activities is working and we dispatch a majority of the fire departments in the county.

The County Government plays a critical role in coordinating these agencies, especially in the face of a major emergency. In the absence of true interoperability between all of these agencies, we are the only mechanism for these various units to coordinate their activities.

However, by the standard Federal definition, we are not "first responders" and so we are not eligible for funding to improve the communications for first responders. I would suggest that Federal law needs to be amended to reflect the involvement of agencies that handle communications (like the County) in addition to those that physically respond to an everyday incident.

In the first hours following the attack of September 11, 2001, the only way we could coordinate the sharing of firefighting, Medical Examiner, Health and Information Technology resources with New York City officials was through the highly trained, volunteer Amateur Radio (ham) operators. This was a result of the fact that normal commercial communications services were unavailable. There was no other single, common communications medium, except the Amateur Radio Service. This irreplaceable resource must be protected against incursion by other interests.

In the past, an answer to the needs of public safety, particularly police, was the use of radios in the 800-Megahertz band. Indeed some of Westchester's police departments use such frequencies in their local areas. However, the County never received an allocation of 800-Megahertz frequencies and is not able to get any because it sits in a large metropolitan area where these frequencies are already licensed to other jurisdictions, such as New York City.

More recently, there have been numerous complaints across the country of interference with these frequencies by commercial wireless services. In turn, there has been extensive lobbying to have local public safety agencies exchange their 800-Megahertz frequencies for others in the 700-Megahertz range. No matter what the outcome of these efforts, it is clear that 800-Megahertz, in our area, has not fulfilled its promise as the single frequency range for first responder coordination and communications.

So the 800-Megahertz strategy of the FCC has been replaced by a plan to allocate spectrum in the 700-Megahertz range for public safety uses. This too is years away in New York State and elsewhere. In New York, a large part of the northern part of the state faces interference from Canadian uses of the same frequencies. In the city metropolitan area, including the suburban counties of the lower Hudson Valley, these frequencies are still used by television stations. It will be 2007 at the earliest that we could get access to these frequencies.

There was some discussion about this bandwidth being able to carry more than the traditional voice communications. However, the FCC's plans for the 700-Megahertz range call for it to be split into voice channels in such a way that it will not support the more advanced forms of communications that are increasingly needed and that emerging technology is making possible.

As it tries to help, it is important for Congress to realize that the traditional solution does not reflect the future of communications and will not meet the more demanding needs of first responders. That traditional solution is to give them a nice big radio that allows them to talk.

Voice communication is essential, but so is the ability to deliver data and video. The first responders need information, like floor plans, on-demand video instructions on how to recognize a contagious disease, details from a geographic information system, transmission of medical data from patients, a view from inside a school building, and the ability to show and discuss what is happening at an incident to an emergency operations center miles away. These are only some examples of the extraordinary expansion of first responder communications capabilities that would be possible, if the spectrum for public safety were managed for the future and not the past.

This is certainly not without precedent. When the suburban counties in metropolitan Washington, DC, realized their failure to properly coordinate in the face of a plane crash into one bridge and then a "jumper" off another bridge, they organized to create a data network (CapWIN) - not just buy the more traditional radios. This has become an enormous success for them, even though they are dependent upon a variety of commercial communications services.

Later today, we are scheduled to show Congressman Engel some examples of modern first responder communications that are possible even in the unlicensed 2.4 Gigahertz range. These are also examples of the efficient use of spectrum because of their reliance on the communications protocols of the Internet. Moreover, these same protocols allow for easy interoperability between agencies with all kinds of different radio, voice, video and other equipment. Commonly called Wi-Fi (a part of the 802.11 family of standards), this is the fastest growing, most competitive, least expensive and most innovative sector of the communications market.

These are impressive technologies, but the problem is they are dependent upon unlicensed frequencies that are getting more crowded and commercialized. Public safety, emergency managers and first responders must have reliable delivery of the information required for proper decision-making and the protection of people's lives. They need sufficient and reliable spectrum to use these modern technologies - but without worry about being crowded out.

In recognition of this need, a few weeks ago, the FCC took a first step by deciding to allocate to public safety about 50 Megahertz of spectrum in the 4.9 Gigahertz range. This is less than the 100 or 200 Megahertz originally anticipated for these needs. It excludes communications to police surveillance helicopters. There is also potential interference from powerful Navy radio equipment, especially in the more populated coastal areas of the country. Nevertheless, this is a good first step forward.

Congress can help to ensure that this decision will achieve its potential to become the basis for the first responder communications system that people deserve. There are four necessary Congressional actions:

First, urge the FCC to make this spectrum available soon. We cannot wait for a years-long regulatory process.
Second, make sure that commercial or other interests will not encroach or interfere with this allocation of spectrum, as has been the case with the previous 800-Megahertz and 700-Megahertz plans. This also means that the new spectrum allocation would be exclusively for public safety and emergency response use of governments or their agents. In the case of my county, that definition includes our public transportation system, which plays an essential role in evacuating the public from harm, especially schoolchildren.
Third, encourage the FCC to adopt a more modern approach to allocating these frequencies, in accordance with the more modern digital technologies they say they want to support. Rather than slicing up the spectrum into less usable allocations to individual agencies, it would make sense to dedicate the whole swath of this spectrum to encourage the deployment of a wireless, secure, Internet-like data network modeled on the way that 2.4 Gigahertz works. Bearing in mind the public safety purpose of 4.9 Gigahertz, the FCC would then permit only authorized agencies to send data over an infrastructure built out by regional (or even Federal) organizations.
Fourth, while modern communications technology is much cheaper to deploy than traditional radio systems, it is not free. Like other local and state governments around the country, Westchester has mostly footed the bill for homeland security on its own, but cannot afford to build out the communications infrastructure or continue to spend to keep up with the improvements in technology. The absence of financial resources can stop progress cold. For this reason, it is good to see that Congressmen Engel, Fossella and Stupak are working with Chairman Upton to create a trust fund for this purpose. Considering that Federal emergency management agencies will also be able to use the new spectrum allocation, the funding will help both the Federal and local governments to protect the public in these ever more dangerous times.

Again, I thank you for your interest in this critical problem and I welcome any questions.

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The Spectrum Needs of Our Nation's First Responders.