Heritage has just released a new paper by my colleague James Carafano, THF’s homeland security guru, on the federal role in emergency communications. The paper finds that throwing more money, or spectrum, emergency communications systems is not the answer. “The commercial space uses the spectrum about 20 times more efficiently than governments,” Carafano writes. “The spectrum licensed to federal, state, and local public safety users supports fewer than 3 million users across the U.S. In contrast, commercial operators (such as Sprint and T-Mobile) support about 80 million users in a comparable amount of spectrum.” Instead, he argues, policymakers should focus on:
– Scaling back bloated, bureaucratic programs and wasteful homeland security and interoperability grants;
– Focusing on developing capabilities to enhance regional information sharing and response to catastrophic disasters;
– Revising federal policies and laws to open dual-use spectrum for commercial and emergency management use, as well as facilitating the sharing of spectrum among local, state, and federal users;
-Setting national standards to promote open-architecture, non-proprietary systems that are compatible with commercial standards;
-Establishing services that can provide an emergency wide-area network wireless system to support existing responder communications equipment and emerging capabilities like VoIP; and
-Assigning specific missions and responsibilities to agencies for the implementation of critical policies.
Worth a read.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Comments on this entry are closed.