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The Emergency Management Take: Spring 2020
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 The Emergency Management Take with Charles Murph
Why public safety agencies are signing up for FirstNet
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No matter how much things change, they also stay the same. Communication always will be important in all types of incident response. Public safety’s need for communications has never been more critical. And public safety’s dependence on wireless broadband has never been more evident.
Surge to FirstNet
As an indication of the urgency, FirstNet activations have continued to increase rapidly. Why this surge in FirstNet subscriptions? Here are just a few reasons:
Quality of service: Quality of service is an important feature of FirstNet. It means that public safety users get the network capacity they need. Wireless networks are taxed to the maximum and broadband traffic is extraordinarily high. Quality of service helps assure that public safety traffic on FirstNet is prioritized.
Uplift: The ability to uplift key personnel or extended primary partners, providing them a higher level of priority access, is a critical feature of FirstNet that enables agencies to manage their response.
Advanced Network Status Tool: This is a new and very exciting feature for FirstNet, especially for emergency management. The Advanced Network Status Tool allows the administrators for FirstNet subscriber agencies to actually see information for individual cell towers, including outages. Knowing that a tower is down can be a critical piece of data in real-time planning. Never before has emergency management been able to monitor the status of a wireless network in a specific area to know whether the network is up before they stage resources for critical functions.
Both the uplift and the advanced network status tools can be found in FirstNet Central – formally called the FirstNet Local Control. FirstNet Central is a single location for agencies to find these and other key features of the FirstNet solution.
We support you
At the FirstNet Authority, we know that this is a busy and stressful time for emergency managers. With our contractor AT&T, we want to do everything we can to help you perform your lifesaving functions. If I can connect you with any resources, information, or tools—or if you have a comment about how FirstNet is working for your organization during this time—please do not hesitate to email me at Charles.Murph@FirstNet.gov.
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 Patient safety has never been more important, and FirstNet is helping first responders and medical providers stay connected and focused on improving patient care.
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 FirstNet Authority in the news: we just marked three years of groundbreaking public-private partnership with AT&T, Ed Parkinson was named the new CEO, and FirstNet Push-to-Talk was released as the nation’s first mission-critical push-to-talk solution.
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 Public safety agencies are using FirstNet to conduct exercises such as counteracting a cyberattack with a deployable or simulating an aircraft accident with mass casualties, and to respond to local, regional, and national emergencies as a rural EMS provider.
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 The FirstNet Authority continues to drive innovation, with support for NIST PSCR’s CHARIoT challenge, which calls on innovators to design augmented reality or develop smart city data streams, and the Tech-to-Protect Challenge, which is announcing up to $2.2 million in prizes to winners on May 1.
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Tech, Innovations, and Hot Topics in Emergency Management
Read what we’ve been hearing from public safety in the field about trends and drivers for emergency management and emergency communications.*
Learn how to properly disinfect your communication devices. In a podcast Ryan Poltermann, Vice Chair of the LMR/LTE Integration and Interoperability Working Group of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, discusses the considerations and resources for disinfecting communication devices. The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal authority that regulates disinfectants, determines the effectiveness of disinfectants for different contaminants. Device manufacturers issue different guidelines for their devices. Ryan has compiled guidelines from the EPA and manufacturers for US and Canadian radio, smartphones, and tablets.
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At the annual Winter Institute Workshop and Exercise, hosted by the Texas A&M University’s Internet 2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC), public safety officials evaluate technologies in real-life scenarios to help shape future technologies and research. During the 2020 exercise, participants practiced integrating new technologies, including a FirstNet deployable, into disaster operations during a simulated cyberattack.
Watch the video on YouTube |
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Charles Murph is the First Responder Network Authority Emergency Management Subject Matter Expert. Learn more about Charles or email him with your questions. |
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Top photo: Emergency managers monitor computers during Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl Parade while large screen projects live camera streams in emergency operations center in Kansas City, Missouri.
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*FirstNet Authority may provide hyperlinks for third-party, non-governmental websites in order to offer additional context and added value for our users. FirstNet Authority does not endorse any product or service and is not responsible, nor can it guarantee the validity or timeliness of the content on hyperlinks outside of the federal government. In addition, users may wish to review privacy notices on non-government sites since their information collection practices may differ from ours.
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