“With a unicast system, a single device is connecting to another single device, but with multicast, it goes out to multiple users at once. “The biggest challenge is when you have 500 people hitting one cell site and they’re competing for the service,” Fowler says. FirstNet is designed to utilize all the frequencies that are available to AT&T, including Band 14 spectrum, providing always-on priority.Īs public safety increasingly relies on broadband, emerging technologies will help ensure mission critical operations are supported. Essentially, everyone is working on one network.” FirstNet makes mission critical communications possibleĪs part of the FirstNet rollout, AT&T has been significantly expanding and improving coverage, including many areas that previously had little or no cellular capability. “It will be easier to combine users, because you’re not confined to a specific radio frequency.

“The great thing with FirstNet PTT is you can easily communicate with other agencies,” he says. Fowler says the 3GPP standards will help to “bridge the services together and support mutual aid capabilities.” FirstNet PTT adoption will likely be a gradual transformation as public safety use cases emerge and evolve. Integration with conventional Land Mobile Radio (LMR) services requires additional technology, generally in the form of a gateway. Get a practical guide to implementing mission critical communications via mobile devices.

“The advantage is that they have all the power of a smartphone and now they can connect to the radio services for ease of wider communication when needed.”

“Plainclothes operations can benefit from lower profile communication tools because they’re less conspicuous,” Fowler explains. With broadband services, public safety can confidently use FirstNet for all their data services like conducting queries or sending photos and videos, as well as FirstNet PTT, because they have assured priority and preemption.”įowler anticipates the earliest adopters of FirstNet PTT will likely be public safety personnel in supporting roles where smartphones are already in heavy use. “Traditional radio systems do what they do very well, but they’re limited to narrowband technology and pretty much a single purpose. “The biggest change will be that FirstNet Push-to-Talk will now complement the broadband services that first responders are already using,” says Robert Fowler, a manager on the AT&T Advanced Business Solutions team tasked with rolling out FirstNet PTT. FirstNet subscribers will be able to take advantage of one-to-one and group calling and messaging, presence (seeing who is online), supervisory override of voice communications, the ability to declare an emergency and preempt other PPT calls, and mutual aid requests to other agencies on the service. FirstNet Push-to-Talk gives compatible smartphones another powerful feature: fast, reliable voice communications over FirstNet’s dedicated and hardened network.įirstNet PTT will be the fastest and highest priority service on the FirstNet network, thanks to PTT servers located across the country. Smartphones are proven in the field and can dramatically improve the operational effectiveness of public safety agencies through rapid exchange of rich data, including photos and videos. FirstNet is bringing reliable, low-latency push-to-talk (PTT) communications to the smartphone with the launch of a new service built on 3GPP Mission Critical technology.Īnnounced on March 31, FirstNet Push-to-Talk will begin as a controlled introduction and become available nationwide to FirstNet subscribers, providing public safety with essential PTT capabilities and powerful 4G LTE data all on one device.

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