What they don't know, is that we have most of these capabilities today with AREDN!
Besides, LTE is not mesh tech today. AREDN is!
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What they don't know, is that we have most of these capabilities today with AREDN!
Besides, LTE is not mesh tech today. AREDN is!
Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer
I was at an IL FirstNet meeting in March (or February). It is going to be quite the boondoggle. They readily admit that nationwide they will need just as many towers as say Verizon, but the subscriber base will be just a fraction of what Verizon has. I believe the number was something like 5 million maximum nationwide subscribers. And then with a straight face they tell us that the monthly cost will be about the same as a Verizon hotspot. This is going to be an incredible waste of money.
Illinois did a similar thing with something called EMNet back in 2007/2008. Each public safety district (thousands of EMA and fire departments) got a windows XP rack mount computer and one-way VSAT dish. The system cost millions of dollars and lasted about 3 years before the powers that be realized what a waste of money it was. The idea was noble - without any terrestrial infrastructure, bulletins could be sent to every emergency response agency in the state. But how often is this really needed, and what other technologies are available?
I'm hopeful our central IL 900MHz AREDN experiment will be useful to show what can be accomplished. And when/if 3GHz support arrives, we will be ready to build and build quickly.
We really don't want to be their backup plan... there are commercial allocations for that. No, we want to be positioned to step in when all else fails. For many agencies that's when their primary infrastructure fails, for those that have their act together... it's when their backups fail.
Andre
I don't want to be the primary or the backup....but I think we do have the chance to show what can be done with the right technology. And there are some use cases where we fit in as the best option.
I really wish we had the ability to do packet prioritization on the existing LTE networks. If my first responders could be given data priority for a price, that's a better idea than building ANOTHER LTE network. I'm a big fan of using verizon and AT&T in my area - works great, good coverage, and price is right.
My point is that FirstNet is so far from being reality...and their assumptions are completely incorrect.
I'd love to be a line item on that budget so that when they put up a tower, an AREDN node goes up for EMCOMM.
;-)