September 24, 2010
Wu: More Progress Needed to Improve Interoperability and Competition for Public Safety Radio Equipment
(Washington, DC) – The House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation held a hearing to discuss the challenges of improving interoperability for public safety radios. The Subcommittee held this hearing as a follow-up to a May hearing on public safety communications where witnesses discussed the status of Project-25, the technical standard intended to enable seamless interoperability for land mobile radios. Though progress has been made, development of the standard has been slow, and testing requirements remain an issue.
Project-25 began in 1989 to remedy the reliance of the public safety community on proprietary communication technology. Without the open standards, public safety radios did not interoperate, hindering response efforts and locking agencies into a single vendor for all of their radio equipment purchases. The emergency response to such tragic disasters as the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11th attacks, and Hurricane Katrina were imperiled because first responders arriving from multiple jurisdictions could not communicate with each other.
“While many factors contribute to lack of interoperability, equipment based on proprietary technology makes the situation far worse. Without a common technical standard, there is no assurance that equipment from one manufacturer will work with equipment from another manufacturer. This means that first responders may not be able to communicate with each other when it matters most. And it means that public safety agencies may be forced into buying all of the components of their radio systems from a single manufacturer, limiting competition, stifling innovation, and driving up prices,” stated Subcommittee Chairman David Wu (D-OR).
The follow-up hearing addressed the effect of the lengthy delay within the standards development process on operators, testers, integrators, and manufacturers of radio technology. Although the Project-25 process has developed standards that allow handheld and portable radios to interoperate across manufactures, the standards for many of the network infrastructure components are not yet completed. In addition, witnesses testified that radio manufacturers often will include proprietary features on standards-based radios. These proprietary features are not interoperable, creating disincentives for public safety agencies to purchase radios from more than one vendor.
“At our hearing in May, we learned about disagreements among some of the players in the P25 standard process over the status of the standard and the degree and rigor of testing that should be required. While these disagreements are about highly technical and complicated issues, they have real-world implications for our first responders and those in harm’s way. Simply put, our local public safety officials need the certainty that a standard provides and, right now, that certainty does not exist,” stated Subcommittee Chairman David Wu (D-OR).
Public safety agencies spend billions of dollars on communications equipment to ensure that first responders can communicate during emergency situations. The size of this taxpayer investment and the mission-critical nature of this equipment both make it imperative that Project-25 fulfill its goals.
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